Dementium: The Ward

This is an amazing piece of work, done by a group of 3 (I believe) in Renegade Kid.
(This review isn’t totally complete, as I’m probably not even 1/5 done this game, and it doesn’t give it enough credit)

The story begins with you… someone, you seem to have a case of amnesia and have no idea where you are. After a quick look around the dark room, you know you don’t want to be there, furniture broken and lying all over the place. Blood smeared everywhere. Not a pretty sight. As you grope your way to the door, you find a notepad with only 2 pages left in it, the first one having a scribbled message of “Why did you do it?” written on it.

She'll be fine.. right?

As you leave your room, you are met with a corridor in a psychiatric ward, smeared with blood everywhere, just as dark as in your room, if not darker. After groping around a bit more you find a flashlight, and with this new ability to actually see in front of you, you’ll find a nightstick. With all this blood everywhere, one might think you’d want to protect yourself. As you venture down the corridors you have a cut scene... yes, a cut scene, and see a woman being dragged away by a butcher knife wielding monster into an emergency room. Don’t want to risk your skin for her do ya? Nightstick versus butcher knife doesn’t sound to good. Luckily it doesn’t notice you and locks the door behind it. Venturing further you are… greeted… by plenty of monstrosities. I won’t go further into detail, as the element of surprise is what fuels this game. Lets just say you won’t be disappointed

Graphically, it’s quite possibly the best on DS. It falls short of being PSP quality.
Though the blood and gore smears seem to be a bit too repetitive, and some of said gore graphics look worse then others. This game rides on fear and surprise, and I have to say, this graphics deliver.

Lets talk audio. In this game, you hear light, Doom 3-like music, and the beat of your own frail heart. Luckily, these things are optional, so you can concentrate more on the ghastly moans and slurching sounds the monstrosities might be making around the corner and prepare to defend yourself. The sounds are crisp, and pretty good for DS speakers.
I haven’t really played far, but I have to say, the one guy I met that talked was really good too. And the singing girl creeped me out. -_- Sounded amazing, but creeped me out, did its job I guess. The piano puzzle sounded great to. I had fun just playing around with the thing.
Overall, great quality sound.

Control wise, it’s great, you touch the screen to look around, (Just like Hunters) you can strafe, and run by double tabbing your D-pad (which sometimes is a problem since the animation for running is barely different from walking, the only way to notice is your panting breath. (You could look back to see how far you are from where you started… but, if your running, 9 times out of 10, you wouldn’t risk looking back) You can switch between weapons/items using the R button and use the L button to shot/use item. (inverse for Left handed users of course) This works well, as, this isn’t a “gun-ho” type game, you go Gun-ho, you die. You want to be careful with the corners, and wasting ammo can be the worst mistake you can make. Ammo is scarce, and monsters are bountiful. This game is quite challenging, and if you run out of ammo, impossible. So make sure each bullet counts. Wouldn’t want to fight a pack of butcher knife wielding monsters with a stick do you?

The challenge in the game is quit entertaining, you have to watch your life, your ammo, your back, that tiny piece of paper in the room you just ran by because it tells you something important about the ward. You can’t take anything for granted, search every room, read every paper, you want to find out as much as possible, find the code for the locker that’s quite possibly holding a shotgun in it, everything! Even though searching is important, it conflicts with the fact that monsters are patrolling the area, take to long, and when you turn around you might find a monster ready to feed on you, or possibly disturb you from your information gathering by attacking you while you read, don’t take long enough and you might have over-looked something. This game keeps you on your toes, and I love it.

So what do we have here? Excellent graphics and sound, an interactive storyline that depends on you to figure it out, and great controls. My pathetic excuse for a review barely makes a mark on this game, there’s so much more to say, so many interesting things, but if I tell you it’ll ruin it. The element of surprise is a must; it’s not worth ruining it for you just to get you to play it. You won’t find it as good. This is one of those games where you want to know as little about it as you can when you start playing it. The more you know about it, the less interesting it’ll be. Its like Jaws. The first movie, we barely saw the shark, and it thrilled us, in the third and second one, we saw it every second scene and got old fast. Jump right into this game and you won’t be sorry.

EDIT: I almost forgot to mention the "broken" part of this game. When you die, instead of being able to load from your last save.. you have to restart from the beginning of the chapter. This is a bit of a nuisance, but for me, it adds to the experiance. Not only do you want to be carful to be caught off guard by a monster because you don't want to be scared, now you really don't want to die cause you don't want to go through all that again! Chapters are about 15-30 mins long each so its not too bad.

As much as I’d love a Wii version, I can’t help but wonder what this could do with the PS3 or 360. This is one of those games that would benefit incredibly from graphics.
Real-life graphics = more fear. However, Renagade Kid has already been talking about a Wii sequal/copy. But I hope they consider a more... graphically advanced console.

I’m not rating it with numbers. Read the review and play the game yourself if you want numbers -_-.

Want screenshots? Play the game.
Want more info? Play the game.

Seriously, looking up on it will only ruin it for you. Walk into it blindly!
In closing….

PLAY THE GAME!!!!

Gameplay footage:


Are you playing it yet?


yay for my half-arsed review?

This post was last modified: 11-06-2007 04:41 PM by Rawrmander.

I like it a lot! As long as you give us some insight into the game, the review is fine. I was about to ask for screenshots, but I shall play the game I guess. Keep up the good work!

hehe, I could have put up some screenshots, but I'm lazy. xD

Isn't that to be expected?

This post was last modified: 11-06-2007 04:10 PM by Kindrik.

Oh yes, I've been wanting this game since I first reported on it. European/Australian release date?

There isn't one...? At least I couldnt find it.

PS: Some of those screenshots you have are from why back Kindrik, like the first one, second one, and third. Not too sure about the fourth.

Not too sure about the PAl release date, maybe they'll fix the save problem for that one, so it might take a little longer.

I got a bit further into the story...
These enimies react to the surroundings. The zombies are blind, but when you whip out your buzz saw or shot a gun somewhere, they hear you and come for you. Bettles are afraid of light, so shine your flashlight at them, moths are attracted to light, turn the flashlight off. Worms? Run the hell away, those things just eat up your ammo >.<

If they could do what they did with the DS' touch screen, I'd love to see what could be done using the Wii remote and nunchuk. And graphics don't only make a horror game. There's more to it than that. The fact that they were able to accomplish what they did on the DS hardware speaks for itself. There should be more than enough power in the Wii to make a great survival horror.
And poking around the Renegade Kid site it looks like they're only interested in Wii and DS and their next project is another DS game. I look forward to the day that they start working on a Wii title.

Some positives and some negatives are being given to this game, I will definitely have to rent it though.