Review: Dementium: The Ward, Part I.
What is it?
Dementium: The Ward is a horror-themed first person shooter adventure game, developed by new studio Renegade Kid and published by Gamecock. The scenario is a pretty standard one, familiar to those who’ve had any encounter with horror: man wakes in a hospital, has no idea who or where he is, wanders the halls tangling with undead monsters and solving puzzles, gradually picking up stronger weapons and tools along the way and unraveling a story as best he can.
This is a surprisingly long game, so I’m splitting this review into two halves, one covering the first eight chapters, and one covering the last eight.
How does it play?
Controls are somewhat similar to those in other DS shooters, in terms of aiming. Sliding the stylus over the lower screen aims on the upper screen. Firing is on L, swapping between the most recent two selected weapons is R, and walking and strafing are on the D-pad. Control is customizable, in case you’re left-handed or you feel like inverting the Y, something that doesn’t make sense to me with direct stylus control like this. Aiming and firing the guns in the game is easy and just forgiving enough: some of the enemies are very small and hitting them with a handgun bullet is easy enough if you can keep your cool, but if you miss by more than a tiny bit, you’re out the bullet and the enemy is eating your ankles.
The game keeps you moving along nicely, providing the illusion of a large, open hospital floor when you really can only travel a single path through the section, due to locked doors and objects in the hallways… because you can’t jump. Find a keycard, move along further. Have a flashback where a creepy girl opens a door, and when you come to, the door’s unlocked. Sequence breakers need not apply, this is a very controlled experience, and it benefits a great deal.
The puzzles are where the game kind of falls down. While they’re pretty varied, they’re also very easy. Each puzzle has a clue attached to it, and you’ll tend to find it in the same room. There was one puzzle where I didn’t understand the clue that would tell me the combination to unlock the cage that held the shotgun, and just by poking the lock a couple of times I found the combination completely by accident. For better or worse, the ease of the puzzles really helps the pacing of the game. I never got stuck on a puzzle, only on enemies.
The bosses in the game are pretty interesting and, in my experience, pretty unique. The first boss you face gets hung up on a wall in the room very easily though, making him easy to take down. The second has a tendency to flee when you get close, meaning all you need to do is chase him around with a shotgun. Bosses enjoy a period of invincibility after being hit, so don’t waste your bullets like I did at first.
The real issue that kept me dragging behind on this game is the save system. You can save and quit the game anytime you like, and pick up again in that room. Die, and you go all the way back to the beginning of the chapter. Chapters in this game function as checkpoints. Open a door, and without forewarning you start a new chapter, and the game is saved. In most cases, this is a relief, but in some situations it’s a real problem if you need to backtrack for an optional, but powerful item you missed, as happened to me. This is made more troublesome by the fact that while the enemies respawn when you reenter the room, any healing items or bullets that are laying around do not, so repeated trips across certain floors can be a pretty harrowing experience. You then have to tiptoe through the next chapter, because if you die you have to do it all over again. I sound like I’m very upset about this, but I’m really not. For me, this adds length and challenge to the game, though I do wish I could carry around healing items and ammunition in my inventory, because they are generously provided, and I had to leave a lot of them behind.
The play is solid, it’s a good, challenging experience and the controls become second nature very quickly.
How does it look and sound?
Dementium‘s presentation is best described as “impressive.” The developer has accomplished a level of visual quality that really scrapes the ceiling on the platform. The graphics are very good considering the limitations imposed by the hardware, and Dementium manages a ridiculous level of atmosphere nearly all the time and the framerate stays around 60. Everything else in the game benefits as a result: you rarely feel out of control (provided you can remain calm), even when you’re being killed. It’s always clear what you’re looking at, even when the texture quality has to be pretty low. The objects strewn about the hallways and rooms of the hospital are the kinds of objects you would expect to see, and you know what they are, even if you don’t know what they’re called. The display itself has a haze of pixels around the edges, making the environments feel dirtier and grittier still, something that I noticed immediately and appreciate. The walls are smeared with blood, and the restrooms are filthy in far more horrible ways. All in all, an excellent presentation.
That said, if you look straight down, you won’t see your feet. In fact, all you ever see of yourself is your arms and weapon. This is an inconsistency in an otherwise solid package, and I noticed this the most when I died or passed out, and it was as if I had keeled over onto my back, rigid, my flashlight still in hand, pointed outward.The flashlight is the first real surprise in the game, and you’ll lean very heavily on it, because otherwise, you can only see a few feet. The light behaves as it should, wrapping around objects naturally and illuminating through glass as you expect it to, which is more than I expected from this platform. It really is an amazing engine Renegade Kid has created.
As solid as the visuals are, the audio is even better. You’re told immediately to play the game with headphones, and with good reason. The sound and music in this game must be experienced through headphones, or it can’t be experienced at all. There are effects and audio details that simply are not audible through the DS’ tiny speakers, things that leap out of the aural landscape when you put on a simple set of earbuds. A notable example is the heartbeat sound effect that is constantly going in the game. I didn’t even notice it until I put on the headphones.
Another perspective on this comes from the voice in the game. There are voice clips that enhance the story and environment, and they play once. Without the headphones, I couldn’t understand them. Finally, there’s the atmosphere. This is a horror game, and if you don’t close yourself in a little bubble with the headphones, it’s nowhere near as intense an experience. Walk past an intercom on the wall, and you’ll hear the light static… or is that someone breathing? Approach an unseen enemy and you’ll hear them growling from the darkness before they come barreling out at you with their internal organs pouring out of their chest. It’s excellent work, and kudos to Renegade Kid’s audio people. This is what we call working outside of your platform’s limits.
The game is surprisingly long, sprawling across two hospital towers, the walkways between (which are populated by scary, screaming, flying severed heads, watch out for that shit) and the outer areas, all chopped into 16 chapters of lengths varying from over an hour to just a couple of minutes. By the time I reached the halfway point, about three hours of gameplay in (that doesn’t count the multiple times replaying entire chapters when I died… damn you, Chapter 4…) I was starting to wonder how much longer the game would go on.
How is it so far?
If I had to point out a single game style that appealed to me less than any other, it would probably be the astonishingly popular first person shooter genre. I’ll play anything from puzzles to real time strategy, but while I’ve tried a handful of different shooters, such as Unreal Tournament, Quake, and Metroid Prime Hunters, these games just really dry out for me quickly. While I don’t enjoy intense horror movies, I do enjoy horror games, like Resident Evil. Adventure games were a favorite of mine in their heyday as well. You can imagine that my enthusiasm for Dementium: The Ward was laced with some level of internal conflict. The game is, when it comes down to it, a first person shooter horror adventure. The game is nothing short of amazing on just about every level, despite a handful of minor issues, most of which are clearly the effects of doing such a complex game on such a simple platform. The fact that a game that traditionally would never appeal to me managed to absorb me so completely is a testament to an excellent design, and I can’t wait to see what comes from Renegade Kid’s studio in the future.
Watch for the second part of my review, and a final score, as soon as I can get the the end of this great game.
Tags: adventure, dementium: the ward, fps, gamecock, renegade kid, survival horror
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