Dementium Remastered

Genre: First-Person Horror

Players: 1

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Review:

Dementium is a First-Person Horror game first released on the Nintendo DS in 2007 as Dementium: The Ward, with this remastered update coming to the Nintendo 3DS in 2015. This game puts players in the role of a man who finds himself in a dark, bloody hospital ward filled with monsters.

The presentation here is mostly pretty good, with some nice lighting effects from your in-game flashlight (which thankfully doesn’t run out of batteries all the time. I hate it when Horror games pull that cheap trick) and some appropriately freakish monsters. There are only two major issues I have with the visuals – the first is that upon defeating monsters, they instantly disappear in a puff of red mist in a manner that just does not at all look right. The second is that all of this game’s environments look pretty similar, making navigation through the mazelike corridors difficult.

The sound is another issue. The game starts with a repeated voice message warning hospital inhabitants to proceed to stairwells, which seems good, but then you find yourself dealing with blaring alarms every now and then. I found myself quickly turning the volume down on my Nintendo 3DS.

The game’s controls are actually pretty good, with players using a combination of the circle pad and either the face buttons or the stylus, and I found the latter to be pretty ideal for the most part. Unfortunately, this game makes the same mistake that Doom 3 initially made – it allows you to have your flashlight or your weapon, but not both, something that may add to the frights, but is ultimately just annoying.

Overall, I have to respect a developer trying to do Horror on Nintendo 3DS, and the graphics in Dementium Remastered are decent enough that I think they could very well get away with it here. However, the slew of problems this game has keep it from being a particularly fun Horror game, and unless you’re a die-hard fan of the genre I would suggest you stick to Resident Evil for your Nintendo 3DS Horror fix.

tl;dr – Dementium Remastered is a First-Person Horror game where players find themselves in a dark, bloody hospital ward filled with monsters. The graphics are decent and have a lot of scary potential, but this game has too many problems to be enjoyable, from repetitive environments, a frustrating need to choose between fighting enemies or seeing them properly, sound issues… In the end, I feel these problems outweigh the good this game has to offer.

Grade: C-

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