Dementium Goes Gold; Final Version Hands-On
By Chris Kohler
October 04, 2007 | 9:20:26 PMCategories:
Portable Gaming
Dementium: The Ward, the Nintendo DS survival horror FPS that made waves at E3 this year,
has entered the manufacturing process, publisher GameCock announced today. The M-rated game will be released by this Halloween, October 31.
I got to check out some of the final version of
Dementium this afternoon when the game's art director Gregg Hargrove came by to show it off. Hargrove is one of
only nine people who worked on the game, but it positively drips polish. And blood.
The game has been cleaned up a lot from the E3 version. The first, most striking change is that the flashlight, which you get very early on in the game, now feels a lot more realistic.
At E3, the flashlight was just a static cone of light in the middle of the screen that turned rigidly when you looked around. But now, when you turn left and right, your character leads a little bit with the flashlight, so it really looks like his wrist is in motion, and you can see the changing effect of the light source coming out of it -- which is really very impressive for Nintendo DS.
I got to check out the rest of the game's weapons, which you can see most of in the screen above right. L-R, there's the flashlight, nightstick, handgun, shotgun, electric buzzsaw, machine gun, and pistol. The final weapon is a sniper rifle. Of these,
the electric buzzsaw (it's apparently actually a bone saw salvaged from a long-dead-possibly-zombified surgeon)
is easily the most awesome. It's also very powerful -- and optional. You can only get it if you solve a complicated puzzle.
That's what intrigues me the most about Dementium, the fact that it's got puzzles alongside the zombie-shooting. Much like in Phantom Hourglass, you'll use an onscreen notebook to jot down clues --
numbers and phrases scribbled in blood on the walls, which of course is how all buildings keep records of their security codes. 
lol
Dementium definitely isn't going to be easy -- the designers put me into a couple of boss battles, one against a guy in a wheelchair with a chain gun for an arm and one against a bunch of mouths on the wall that vomited leeches, and I died against both of them. It then boots you back to the start of the chapter, so there's a lot of risk inherent in taking on these bosses. And there are no health refills!
This seems pretty hardcore.
But there's likely to be a lot of reward for your persistence. The game's cinema scenes (with the requisite creepy little girl -- what is it about those things) are very nicely done, and the environments just exude a level of quality I'm not really used to from third-party DS games. Dementium has an uphill battle ahead of it. Can you imagine releasing an M-rated FPS on the Nintendo DS? But
it looks like it'll be worth it.
