Laughing at: Dementium: The Ward (now on PC)

This one’s a bit of an outlier. You see, I have played Dementium: The Ward back on Nintendo DS. And watched people play it to completion on streams. So I was fully aware of what an absolute garbage this game is. But I wanted to get it out of my system, I guess, and have a playable PC version. And be able to easily install it to listen to some of the worst soundtracks in history of gaming. So, without going any further – you shouldn’t consider this game seriously at all. But, it is very cheap, the PC port is really good, so if you’re in the mood for some astonishing horror themed trash, this can be entertaining.

Long time ago a small indie developer Renegade Kid pitched Konami the idea of them making a new Silent Hill game for DS. Konami turned it down (surprisingly, given what crap Silent Hill was already turned into), so it was instead reworked into a completely standalone game called Dementium: The Ward. It has poor excuse for a plot, horrible combat, terrible enemy design, keyboard cat-quality soundtrack, locations that all looked the same and completely linear progression despite backtracking being technically available. But it also looked and felt kinda neat for a Nintendo DS game, so for that novelty alone, people kinda enjoyed it for what it was. Few years later they’ve released a sequel that was as stupid and nonsensical as the first game, but had quite a few gameplay improvements and that game was also, for whatever reason, ported to PC as Dementium II HD with no involvement of the original developers. The original game would also later be remastered for Nintendo 3DS, before the original developers had to close their doors.

And that last version is what seems to be the basis of the new PC release of the game. It’s slightly more pretty looking, but not much and the game remains horrible to play. But it has to be said that the PC release is really well handled. I decided to stick with the downscaled visuals that somewhat resembled the DS release, though one thing that is completely missing from the new version for whatever dumb reason is the fact that you cannot take in-game notes for the few situations you need it. On DS you could use a stylus to write down codes, in the new version there is still the item for it, but it’s unusable.

I once again decided not to finish, this time dropping on the final chapter of the game, because the final combat push and the final boss are terribly designed. I know that after that comes a quick nonsensical ending, so I’m good. I’ve listened to enough hilarious Casio tunes and killed enough meowing baby slugs to get it out of my system. For game preservation, I’m glad this exists, for how godsawful the game is, (though notes taking should be restored). But I can’t recommend this to anyone either.