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Pogi's Horror Review: Dementium: The Ward and Dementium II
15 years ago
This is a double review, simply because I feel I can't speak about one without the other. Dementium: The Ward and Dementium II are a couple of DS games produced by Rengade Kid. You might be thinking "How can a DS game possibly be scary?" but stick around, you'll find out.
Dementium: The Ward
Gameplay
Released around 2007, Dementium was the brain child of Renegade Kid and Gamecock studios. The gameplay was heralded as a mixture of Doom 3 and Silent Hill, and to it's credit, that's essentially what it is. Dark hallways splattered with blood and gore, eerie noises and creepy music and sound effects all added to the atmosphere. This game was genuinely scary. To be honest, the game had a lot of shortcomings, but ironically they added a lot to the game more than took it away. Allow me to explain.
We'll start with the broken save system. The game would save whenever you completed a chapter, there being about 18 to 20 chapters total. You could save and quit at any time during a chapter, but the problem there being that whenever you restarted, you would always restart at the beginning of teh chapter. this pretty much limited your saving options. (although you could have two save files.) Your character also suffered from the infamous one arm syndrome: he could weidl a weapon, or a flashlight. But not both. the darkness was all encroaching, The only way to see much of any sort of distance was with the flashlight. but in order to fight back, you had to use a weapon. This meant fighting almost blind, adding to the fear, knowing that there is an enemy right outside your field of vision, and bracing for the inevitable conflict. So although a drawback, this actually improved the fear of the game. Another such drawback that actually was in a way an improvement was the lack of an inventory. Health items could only be used on teh spot. if you were low on health, you had to hunt down some pills.You weapons were also limited on the amount of reserve ammo you could carry, often forcing you leave ammo boxes behind to come back for later when you needed them. What made this even more nerve wracking was that once you left a room, if you went back in the enemies you had killed will have returned. The problem being that health items and ammo boxes did not. Every bullet ends up having to eb sparingly used, and you become very good at avoiding enemies and using melee weapons to finish them off. The hardest melee weapon to get is the Buzz Saw, but it's easily the best when all you have to do is hold the attack button and enemies impale themselves on your saw.
Speaking of enemies, let's talk about enemies for a second, because this was one place where the game fell short. Enemies were very bland and repetitive. There was the worm, the chest Maw, and the Bansheee. Then there was the acid worm, the acid chest maw, and the acid banshee, the only difference from their non-acidic counterparts was a green tint and the ability to shoot acid at you. Then there were cockroach swarms, but they were next to impossible to kill and were better off simply avoided. There were 3 bosses in teh game, but two of them you fought twice: The Wheelchair, which was this psycho in a wheelchair with a minigun strapped to his arm, and this huge sack of flesh with a meat cleaver for one arm and an acid shooting giant syringe for the other. The final boss just being a giant puss oozing room with bloody vents that spawned worms indefinitely, where you have to destroy all the vents to escape. The final boss is the mad doctor behind all the evil happenings going on, and now I'm getting into the really good part.
The story:
You are William Redmoore. You wake up in a hospital room with no memory of who you are, or why you're there, or for that matter how you got there. You had a nightmare, involving you strapped toa wheelchair being wheeled down the hospital corridor, horrible things passing you left and white before being dumped into an inky black pit, waking up in your room. YOu find a key, with a notepad with a note scrawled on it telling you to get out, and you let yourself out.
Almost as soon as your out in the hallway you realize things are not right. a red flashing light is accompanied by a siren, with an eerie voice saying over hte loudspeaker. "This is an emergency. Everyone must evacuate the building. Locate the nearest stairwell." well there's a stairwell immediately to your left, but sadly it's chained up tight. If you head down teh hallway, you find a room that's been forced open, with a trail of blood as if something were being dragged leading further down the hall. as you follow it through the darkness you see the first boss, dragging a bloodied woman through a set of double doors. She looks up at you and screams, her voice sounding like static, before the double doors shut tight and lock in front of you.
This sets the tone for the rest of the game. This woman actually appears several times as you explore the massive Redmoore Memorial Hospital, always bloodies, trying to help you, and always being yanked away by some dark creature. You also come across a small, pale girl who sings songs, cries, and runs away at various points throughout the game. You come to realize that in fact these people are your wife and daughter, and that you were hospitalized in this hospital for the criminally insane for murdering them... but you see them at every turn. How odd. Not to mention the hospital is named after you, Redmoor memorial hospital, as if you're dead. stranger still. As you poke around you find out the monsters are the result of crazed experiments on inmates performed by the mad doctor, a man in a black doctor's coat and mask with goggles that appear surprisingly sinister. He's your final boss, his glowing hands yanking you around like a puppet, as if he has some otherworldly power... or maybe you're just insane this whole time. Once you beat him... You wake up in your hospital room again. except it's bright outside, not a speck of dirt, no blood, no gore.You get up, you walk to the door, and it opens with your wife and daughter there, then it fades to white...
Then it zooms out, and you find yourself on the operating table with the top part of your head cut off, the mad doctor tinkering with your brain. "The first phase of the operation is a success..." he holds up a massive saw. 'Now for phase 2...."
Dementium 2. FIrst off, let's talk about what they fixed from the first game.
Instead of the broken save system, there are mirrors with an eerie light that you can save at, healing you to max health. when you quit and come back, you come back where you had saved at. The one hand syndrome has been fixed, allowing you to use both a weapon and the flashlight at the same time... provided you have a hand free. This I found interesting, as certain weaker items, like the dagger and handgun, give you one hand free to use the flashlight. stronger weapons however, like the sledgehammer and the shotgun, require both your hands to be used, and thus leaves you in the dark for the duration that you use them. Pills and ammo can now be collected to be used later at any time of your choosing, just by accessing your inventory screen. The buzz saw makes a great comeback, but they nerfed it a bit, making it possible for the buzz saw to over heat, and if it does you have to wait for it to cool down before you can use it again. still, the best melee weapon in the game by far, if used in moderation. The enemy monotony has been broken, a wider, more visually unique selection of enemies making their appearance, plus a broader selection of bosses. THey also give you more weapons and more unique weapons, plus the weapons themselves have multiple purposes. For example, the sledgehammer can be used to break down barricades on doors, and the mysterious relic weapon also doubles as a magical key. The game however has it's shortcomings, as it lacks a second save file, and its' noticably shorter than the first game. HOwever you visit a wider selection of locales than the same-looking hospital walls from the first game, so the trade off is definitely a plus.
Story:
The second game actually continues where the first left off. You're still William Redmoore, and you wake up to a nurse informing you that you're coming out of brain surgery, and that you've been sent to this asylum for the criminally insane. You start to find postcards from yourself, from paradise, warning about things to come, and visions of your wife still haunt your waking moments. The game starts behaving much like Silent hill, a parallel world of twisted metal, acid and lava, directly correlating to where you are in the real world. IT makes you think there might still be some psychosis lingering, but it becomes more and more apparent that there is in fact a dark, magical power at work here. You discover that the mad doctor is in fact being controlled by some otherworldly entity, who's attempting to break free into the real world. You escape teh asylum into the neihgboring town of perf, only to discover it's over run my monsters, having been destroyed by a boss enemy known as the Wendigo Witch. YOu eventually turn back to stop the mad doctor once and for all, going back to the asylum, discovering a mine system nearby which you explore, before returning to the asylum one final time to end it all. The bosses are epic, the gameplay is good, the final cutscene is kind of weak and confusing but leaves you guessing, and the potential for a third dementium down the line. Here's hoping.
Both games are great to play, run at a beautiful 60 FPS which is great for the DS, handles well, Renegade Kid seems to only be improving with each new game they make. I strong recommend these games to any horror buff who happens to own a DS.
Dementium: The Ward
Gameplay
Released around 2007, Dementium was the brain child of Renegade Kid and Gamecock studios. The gameplay was heralded as a mixture of Doom 3 and Silent Hill, and to it's credit, that's essentially what it is. Dark hallways splattered with blood and gore, eerie noises and creepy music and sound effects all added to the atmosphere. This game was genuinely scary. To be honest, the game had a lot of shortcomings, but ironically they added a lot to the game more than took it away. Allow me to explain.
We'll start with the broken save system. The game would save whenever you completed a chapter, there being about 18 to 20 chapters total. You could save and quit at any time during a chapter, but the problem there being that whenever you restarted, you would always restart at the beginning of teh chapter. this pretty much limited your saving options. (although you could have two save files.) Your character also suffered from the infamous one arm syndrome: he could weidl a weapon, or a flashlight. But not both. the darkness was all encroaching, The only way to see much of any sort of distance was with the flashlight. but in order to fight back, you had to use a weapon. This meant fighting almost blind, adding to the fear, knowing that there is an enemy right outside your field of vision, and bracing for the inevitable conflict. So although a drawback, this actually improved the fear of the game. Another such drawback that actually was in a way an improvement was the lack of an inventory. Health items could only be used on teh spot. if you were low on health, you had to hunt down some pills.You weapons were also limited on the amount of reserve ammo you could carry, often forcing you leave ammo boxes behind to come back for later when you needed them. What made this even more nerve wracking was that once you left a room, if you went back in the enemies you had killed will have returned. The problem being that health items and ammo boxes did not. Every bullet ends up having to eb sparingly used, and you become very good at avoiding enemies and using melee weapons to finish them off. The hardest melee weapon to get is the Buzz Saw, but it's easily the best when all you have to do is hold the attack button and enemies impale themselves on your saw.
Speaking of enemies, let's talk about enemies for a second, because this was one place where the game fell short. Enemies were very bland and repetitive. There was the worm, the chest Maw, and the Bansheee. Then there was the acid worm, the acid chest maw, and the acid banshee, the only difference from their non-acidic counterparts was a green tint and the ability to shoot acid at you. Then there were cockroach swarms, but they were next to impossible to kill and were better off simply avoided. There were 3 bosses in teh game, but two of them you fought twice: The Wheelchair, which was this psycho in a wheelchair with a minigun strapped to his arm, and this huge sack of flesh with a meat cleaver for one arm and an acid shooting giant syringe for the other. The final boss just being a giant puss oozing room with bloody vents that spawned worms indefinitely, where you have to destroy all the vents to escape. The final boss is the mad doctor behind all the evil happenings going on, and now I'm getting into the really good part.
The story:
You are William Redmoore. You wake up in a hospital room with no memory of who you are, or why you're there, or for that matter how you got there. You had a nightmare, involving you strapped toa wheelchair being wheeled down the hospital corridor, horrible things passing you left and white before being dumped into an inky black pit, waking up in your room. YOu find a key, with a notepad with a note scrawled on it telling you to get out, and you let yourself out.
Almost as soon as your out in the hallway you realize things are not right. a red flashing light is accompanied by a siren, with an eerie voice saying over hte loudspeaker. "This is an emergency. Everyone must evacuate the building. Locate the nearest stairwell." well there's a stairwell immediately to your left, but sadly it's chained up tight. If you head down teh hallway, you find a room that's been forced open, with a trail of blood as if something were being dragged leading further down the hall. as you follow it through the darkness you see the first boss, dragging a bloodied woman through a set of double doors. She looks up at you and screams, her voice sounding like static, before the double doors shut tight and lock in front of you.
This sets the tone for the rest of the game. This woman actually appears several times as you explore the massive Redmoore Memorial Hospital, always bloodies, trying to help you, and always being yanked away by some dark creature. You also come across a small, pale girl who sings songs, cries, and runs away at various points throughout the game. You come to realize that in fact these people are your wife and daughter, and that you were hospitalized in this hospital for the criminally insane for murdering them... but you see them at every turn. How odd. Not to mention the hospital is named after you, Redmoor memorial hospital, as if you're dead. stranger still. As you poke around you find out the monsters are the result of crazed experiments on inmates performed by the mad doctor, a man in a black doctor's coat and mask with goggles that appear surprisingly sinister. He's your final boss, his glowing hands yanking you around like a puppet, as if he has some otherworldly power... or maybe you're just insane this whole time. Once you beat him... You wake up in your hospital room again. except it's bright outside, not a speck of dirt, no blood, no gore.You get up, you walk to the door, and it opens with your wife and daughter there, then it fades to white...
Then it zooms out, and you find yourself on the operating table with the top part of your head cut off, the mad doctor tinkering with your brain. "The first phase of the operation is a success..." he holds up a massive saw. 'Now for phase 2...."
Dementium 2. FIrst off, let's talk about what they fixed from the first game.
Instead of the broken save system, there are mirrors with an eerie light that you can save at, healing you to max health. when you quit and come back, you come back where you had saved at. The one hand syndrome has been fixed, allowing you to use both a weapon and the flashlight at the same time... provided you have a hand free. This I found interesting, as certain weaker items, like the dagger and handgun, give you one hand free to use the flashlight. stronger weapons however, like the sledgehammer and the shotgun, require both your hands to be used, and thus leaves you in the dark for the duration that you use them. Pills and ammo can now be collected to be used later at any time of your choosing, just by accessing your inventory screen. The buzz saw makes a great comeback, but they nerfed it a bit, making it possible for the buzz saw to over heat, and if it does you have to wait for it to cool down before you can use it again. still, the best melee weapon in the game by far, if used in moderation. The enemy monotony has been broken, a wider, more visually unique selection of enemies making their appearance, plus a broader selection of bosses. THey also give you more weapons and more unique weapons, plus the weapons themselves have multiple purposes. For example, the sledgehammer can be used to break down barricades on doors, and the mysterious relic weapon also doubles as a magical key. The game however has it's shortcomings, as it lacks a second save file, and its' noticably shorter than the first game. HOwever you visit a wider selection of locales than the same-looking hospital walls from the first game, so the trade off is definitely a plus.
Story:
The second game actually continues where the first left off. You're still William Redmoore, and you wake up to a nurse informing you that you're coming out of brain surgery, and that you've been sent to this asylum for the criminally insane. You start to find postcards from yourself, from paradise, warning about things to come, and visions of your wife still haunt your waking moments. The game starts behaving much like Silent hill, a parallel world of twisted metal, acid and lava, directly correlating to where you are in the real world. IT makes you think there might still be some psychosis lingering, but it becomes more and more apparent that there is in fact a dark, magical power at work here. You discover that the mad doctor is in fact being controlled by some otherworldly entity, who's attempting to break free into the real world. You escape teh asylum into the neihgboring town of perf, only to discover it's over run my monsters, having been destroyed by a boss enemy known as the Wendigo Witch. YOu eventually turn back to stop the mad doctor once and for all, going back to the asylum, discovering a mine system nearby which you explore, before returning to the asylum one final time to end it all. The bosses are epic, the gameplay is good, the final cutscene is kind of weak and confusing but leaves you guessing, and the potential for a third dementium down the line. Here's hoping.
Both games are great to play, run at a beautiful 60 FPS which is great for the DS, handles well, Renegade Kid seems to only be improving with each new game they make. I strong recommend these games to any horror buff who happens to own a DS.
