Dementium: The Ward
Okay, back again this week with yet another DS title.
The recent RubyQuest adventures on 4chan’s Traditional Games board piqued my interest for a new genre that I’ve never considered playing, the Survival Horror genre. I checked at my local gameshop and found a title a few manfriends of mine mentioned a couple of times and since I had money to burn, I picked it up.
Back home I started playing it. I’d done RubyQuest so I knew what to expect somewhat, but everything is just better in 3D with some good lightning flashes and eerie music. I knew that if I wanted to fully enjoy this I had to get into the mindset of an survivalist, so I tried my best to be shocked when I found a child’s playing room with a tiny toy piano and the word DEAD written on the wall above it. It was only later that I noticed the words were written in blood.
That’s another thing there is a whole lot of in this game: blood. It’s smeared everywhere except the starting area. If you collected everything and put it in a bag you could drop it on Tokyo and paint every fucking chink in the “Metropolis” red.
Well let’s talk about the inventory. When you first start out you’ll trip over a flashlight that convienently flickers, a nightstick that you can’t use along with a flashlight(I never realized those things were that heavy) and health, health, health, and more health. I only died once so far because I actually payed more attention to the girl I was talking too(If anyone says that’s a lie, it is; I was taking a shit and had to force out a hard one. I do talk to girls sometimes though) and got attacked by a flying fucking head, which was a sudden change from zombie, zombie, killer cockroach, zombie, brainsuckworm. So far the enemies have been quite easy to beat if you pay attention to everything. Sometimes they just appear out of nowhere and the worms can really get you tense and nervous when all you can do is run and shoot or die. Also you get a gun, which you steal from a corpse, who wasn’t a corpse when you first saw him, he was a survivor who failed to notice the two zombies behind him and since you are a nameless mute who may or may not be responsible for all of this you didn’t warn him in time.
Areas are kind of same-y but that’s what you get in hospitals and finding out where to go next is just as annoying as in real life where you have to drop whatever your doing, take out a map, find out where you are and where you’re facing, put back map, take out nightstick and smack the zombie chewing on your right buttock 3 times so he bursts into flame.
The graphics are quite good for a DS title and the music combined with the lightning is enough to send at least a rookie Survival Horror player into a trance of fidgeting and twitching only to look at the clock realizing he had to go to work 2 hours ago. It is arguably one of the best games I have played on the DS, but that’s probably just the pink new-genre-goggles.
The game has it’s flaws though. The touch screen controls are not bad but they feel uneasy, as do all touch screen controls in shooters. Games like Pac-Pix and Trauma Center are suited to the screen, but now it’s just a slight step above regular consoles. Games like these really only come out great on PC’s, the superior gaming platform.
I recommend to get this if you want a SH-game for on the road, which I doubt because this genre really shines alone in the dark.
Bad puns aside, if you want to get a good game for the DS and have played everything you can think of, get this.
It’s by a rookie developer and I applaud the effort and would like to hereby voice my wish to other veteran gamedevelopers to take the motivation these people have put into it and make an even better game.
This was a short review because I’m going to be talking to a girl and it might take quite some time, seems like it’s going to be a watery conversation.
