When I first heard about Dementium: The Ward I had plenty of mixed thoughts. It was being developed by Renegade Kid and published by Gamecock who are both, despite recent VGA actions, darlings of the small studio game scene, but could a game really pull off scary on my friendly little DS? Add to that a shaky track record for first person shooters on the DS and you’ve got a game that I desperately wanted to be good but was terribly afraid wasn’t going to be. Did Dementium turn out to be another Goldeneye DS let down or was Renegade Kid able to create a truly enthralling horror game for the DS?

Find out after the jump.

You know it is going to be a problem when a review starts off by mentioning the save function of a game. This is because if a game has a good, or even functioning, save system then it isn’t mentioned at all in a review. It’s only when a game’s save function interferes with the quality of a game that it gets mentioned. Sadly that is what I have to do here. Dementium’s save system is so atrocious that it almost ruins the game itself. I say that this early in the review because it greatly affects the quality of the game. I almost didn’t finish this game because of how the save system works. However, I’m getting ahead of myself; you need to know what game the save system is ruining before I can tell you how it ruins it.

Dementium plays like most FPS on the DS, with looking handled by the stylus and walking/running and strafing being handled by the D-pad. The controls work as precisely as you would expect them to; you’re able to touch the area you want to shoot at and then shoot. Firing is done with the L-button and all other actions like changing weapons or accessing the menu are taken care of via the touch screen HUD that is well laid out at the bottom of the screen, even if it does lead to some touchy situations when you need to change your weapon quickly. Ammo is pretty plentiful along with health, and the weapons don’t stray too far away from FPS mainstays like the shotgun and the pistol. The one exception is the bone saw, but even that is just a glorified chainsaw. At face value, Dementium seems like a FPS, but in reality this is not the case.

In actuality Dementium plays much more like a survival horror game than an FPS. This is for a myriad of reasons; first and foremost being that the point of the game is to survive horrors. You wake up in a dark, bloodied and abandoned psychiatric hospital or ward (thus the title) without a clue what you are doing there and absolutely no items in your inventory. Clearly something has gone wrong as there is an alarm going off telling you to leave the building and blood all over the walls. From here on, the plot of the game plays out as you wander the halls of the hospital attempting to piece together whom you are and what you are doing. This all happens through basic fetch and retrieve puzzles that aren’t too creative but are still pretty fun, especially with the added feature of a note pad to help you remember numbers and codes. The story really never gets that deep as cut scenes are limited, and even when they do play you don’t get that much background information on your character. However, there is enough there to keep you interested in what you’re doing and wanting to know just what is going on.

Of course wandering the halls of the hospital isn’t as easy as all that, as the place seems to have been infested with creatures hell-bent on mindlessly killing you, and all the power has gone out in the building. It is how these two mechanics play out that push the game into the survival horror genre and out of FPS. Monsters pop up in a good amount of the rooms, but they don’t move from room to room, and running and gunning doesn’t make much sense with them. In fact, many times killing the creatures isn’t necessary so that avoiding monsters becomes just as important as shooting them. Monsters jump out of closets and through doors, making for some impressive scares thanks mostly in part to the game’s genuinely spooky atmosphere, and while the AI isn’t anything beyond charge and attack the fact that different bad guys are taken out more easily by different guns keeps the battles pretty interesting for a while. For instance the most abundant monster has a gaping hole in its chest, revealing its heart, which when hit with a precise shot from a pistol will take the monster out, while worms crawling on the ground are more easily dealt with the machine gun. The monsters can do some serious damage, so abundant health is actually pretty necessary at points. Unfortunately, the variety of creatures (and room layouts) starts to lack as you get further along in the game and battles tend to get repetitive, to the point where running through a room without fighting becomes more fun than killing the bad guys. The worst offense is when the game throws the old “fight all the bosses again” tactic at you. This tactic works when a game’s bosses are worth playing twice, but such is not the case with Dementium. This isn’t to say that the boss battles are bad, but because of that pesky save feature (I’m getting to it, hold your horses) you’ve probably already played them a couple times anyway.

Now onto the really good stuff, the stuff that puts the horror into survival horror. The atmosphere of the game is amazing and completely enveloping. Playing with my headphones on and in the dark, I found myself forgetting that I wasn’t in the ward myself. Hats off to Renegade Kid for putting so much care and attention into the game. The graphics are no slouch; in fact they impressed the hell out of me with some really detailed (for the DS) textures and a smooth frame rate for the entire game. It is the flash light mechanic that really makes the game creepy and creative, though. Since the hospital has no light, other than dramatic lightning flashing in through windows, you can’t really see further than a few feet in front of you leaving most hallways looking like endless spaces of black. Luckily, at the beginning of the game you pick up a flashlight which casts a beam of light wherever you are looking and lights up the surrounding area slightly allowing you to see what is ahead of you. The problem is if you’re holding the flashlight, you aren’t able to hold a weapon, meaning that in order to kill monsters, you’ll have to do it in the dark. This makes every room that you step into a potential death trap, since you are either totally defenseless or have no idea what is coming. The game is already creepy as hell, and walking around without a gun out just makes it all the scarier.

The true scares come from the sound, though. This is by far the best use of sound in a game this year, and it would be an insult to the games designers if you played it with anything but some high quality headphones. Not only is the music haunting and perfectly paced for the game, but the sound design is down right horrifying. Your heartbeat plays softly in the back ground getting faster and louder the more damage you take. It is an awesome mechanic that actually gets your own blood pumping as you get closer and closer to death. It completely immerses you in the game. Aside from this, the sounds that the monsters make are some of the most disturbing that I have ever heard in a game. Ranging from deep, labored breathing to what sounds like a woman shrieking, they all make you jump the second you hear them and make the whole flashlight mechanic even creepier since oftentimes you can hear but not see the bad guys. You should play this game simply to hear the great sound design, and how a medium such as sound can be perfectly executed.

However, the atmosphere and gameplay are almost entirely ruined by a save mechanic that is so flawed that I would have put the game down permanently if the rest of it hadn’t been so interesting. The problem is this: if you die, you must start the level completely and totally start over. Not from your last save point, not from any checkpoint but from the beginning of the level. While the levels are relatively short, they are not short enough for this. Even so, I could excuse this fact as a way for the designers to suck you more fully into the game, or some lame excuse like that, if there was at least a checkpoint when you got to bosses. Alas, there is not; meaning if you die at a boss, which is almost a given unless you’ve cheated and learned how to beat him the first time, you have to start the entire f*cking level over before you can try beating him again. As you can imagine, the levels with bosses at the end get played through quite a few times, and while they’re interesting enough the first or second time through, by the third or fourth time all you want to do is charge through and get back to the boss. It boggles my mind why they would set up a save system like this, especially when you have only one life, so that every death sends you straight back to the beginning. Like I said, it is aggravating to the point of ruining the game.

So there it is. A perfectly good game, with some amazing sound and features that really push the capabilities of the DS is made almost unplayable by a save system that is nothing but annoying. It is a real shame, too because Dementium: The Ward offers something that you aren’t going to find anywhere else on the DS platform. If you don’t die too much and have some patience, you will find a truly immersive experience from Dementium, but in all likelihood you’ll probably just get fed up playing through the same level multiple times. It is hard for me to not recommend this game because I want more like it on the system, but unless you’re a survival horror fan you might not have the will to truck through the levels over and over.