Tiny Diggers – An iPad Construction Truck Game for Kids Age 2-5

As my First Thirty write-up will attest, I’d been waiting for this game for months. The marketing – a slick production of tantalizing horror with just a dash of dark humour – seemed crafted especially for someone just like me. Truth be told, my Nintendo DS has been nothing but an expensive paperweight of late, and I’ve been desperate for a new DS title to really satisfy the horror-freak in me for some time. As you can imagine, when Dementium II finally hit my mat, I got stuck right in – huddled on the sofa in the dark and with just my headphones and racing heart for company.

And then my DSi died about two hours in. Gutted.

I got there in the end, though. When I finally picked up a replacement I was able to jump right back in to decide for myself if Renegade Kid has actually delivered what the chilling, creepy marketing had all but promised me . . .

The game kicks off where the original Dementium title leaves off. I say this with confidence despite having never played the original title, but thankfully I can confirm that it is possible to navigate both the narrative and the game itself without any prerequisite knowledge. Playing as the eyes and ears of William Redmoor, a criminally insane patient (prisoner?) at the misleading and innocuously titled Bright Dawn Treatment Centre, it’s soon apparent that my life is a smorgasbord of guts and gore and populated by screaming, writhing souls that may or may not be imagined side effects of my, ahem, ‘treatment’.

It’s a good start, right?

Right from the get-go we garner that Redmoor’s incarceration is far from straight-forward. Not only are we being held in this weird half-sanatorium slash half-prison arrangement, the nightmare is compounded further by inexplicable Silent Hill-like shifts from his imprisoned reality to some hellish alternate world. The only constant is that each existence sees me running for my life from an array of people and things all hellbent on beating me to a pulp.

Thankfully, there’s a plethora of makeshift items for me to utilise and a generous inventory that permits Redmoor to hoard items, useful for the more protracted and time-consuming battles. Like any good survival horror title worth its salt, the environments offer up a range of inexplicably discarded firearms and ammo, and a selection of excellent melee weapons to give Redmoor the upper hand. Though not particularly unique, the combat scheme is fluid and robust and although I spent more time than I would have liked shouting at the screen because Billy-Boy was casually strolling when he should have been running for his life (the double-tap function was often irritatingly unresponsive), on the whole it did exactly as one would expect. Good stuff.

The narrative takes us on a straight-forward exploration as, through bits of conversations, internal monologues and various discoverable items, Redmoor slowly pieces together the jigsaw of his shattered memories. Crawling maze-like through the environments of both maddening worlds, the game offers an enjoyable if predictable array of puzzles, item collection and monster-bashing but the story that does unfold is disappointingly transparent and I found the climax disappointingly thin. In and of itself this wouldn’t be so bad had it not been for the surprisingly simplistic, undemanding gameplay. Don’t get me wrong; I’ve never been a fan of titles that make you trek through countless missions and ridiculously obscure quests for no purpose, but Dementium II just wasn’t demanding enough, not even in the Boss Battles where you would expect to be taken up an notch or two. Only in close combat did I ever feel truly threatened, and only then because the game lacked a simple block function, making numerous, close-quarter hostiles difficult – if rarely impossible – to overcome.

Given the restraints of the platform, it is a beautiful game to watch, and peculiarly well suited to the small screen. The environments are grotesque enough to be interesting, albeit somewhat repetitive, although the word on the (gaming) street is that they are significantly improved from the last game. Trouble is, rarely do we ever see a location just the once and this is where Dementium II starts to lose its shine for me. Although backtracking has become something of a predictable and irritating staple of survival horror titles, DII did this with alarming and frustrating regularity, enough that it sullied the experience and made some sections of gameplay far more annoying than enjoyable.

The most frightening part? The length. This is a short, short game. It’s possible to complete in one sitting (I finished myself inside six hours) and with only a weak unlockable side quest as your reward, there’s next to zero replay value here. Which is a shame; had the backtracking not been so monstrously out of hand on the first play-through, there’s every chance I would’ve liked to have slipped into Redmoor’s insane world again.

Dementium II is enjoyable enough, but there’s nothing particularly new here. While it offers up a perfectly adequate blend of horror and mayhem, it’s still some distance away from its Survival Horror cousins, and perhaps only a dark room and headphones – thanks to the title’s fantastic aural accompaniment and excellent lighting – could make this title seem truly terrifying.