Review: Dementium: The Ward – Remastered (Switch) – From DS to just S

Happy Scary Season! Today, I’ve got a short little review of a remaster of a short little game. Dementium: The Ward.

Dementium: The Ward is a first-person survival-horror shooter developed by Renegade Kid and released on the Nintendo DS in 2007. Renegade Kid was a handheld-focused developer made up of former Iguana Entertainment (Turok, South Park) devs who saw the DS as a “portable N64” and wanted to continue making 64-bit-ish shooters. They went on to make a sequel to Dementium a couple years later along with another DS shooter called Moon. When the Nintendo 3DS released, they essentially remade their back catalog for the new platform and made a couple platformers (Mutant Mudds, Xeodrifter) before closing in 2016.

This new remaster of Dementium for the Nintendo Switch, well, isn’t really new. It’s a retooling of Renegade Kid’s own remaster of Dementium for the 3DS. The 3DS version of Dementium wasn’t so much a total overhaul to the original DS release but a more visual facelift to bring the crunchy low-resolution DS textures and models up to the 3DS’ not as low but still quite low resolution targets but of course also added 3D and supported the 3DS’ stick(s) for movement and aiming. The Switch release looks basically identical to the 3DS release, albeit at a much higher resolution. It doesn’t seem like any of the models or textures got touched up again for the Switch release, but it does seem like the focus was to keep this release still looking a bit ‘retro’. This is made evident by the always on ‘retro’ filter that adds a bit of N64-style antialiasing and some baked-in on-screen grime. You cannot turn off the filter (I kinda wish you could) but there is a second ‘retro CRT’ option that boosts gamma a bit and adds scan lines. It looks fine, actually. But I feel like it doesn’t really match the vibe of playing an old DS game. Plus, the boosted brightness doesn’t look too hot on the Switch OLED’s screen.

The real drastic change here is the lack of a second screen. The DS didn’t have many extra buttons or sticks, so the second screen was crucial to a lot of games. It also allowed for fun little extra bits of interaction to add a bit of immersion. In the very beginning of the game, you pick up a notepad. On the DS or 3DS, you can open up the notepad and write down notes, whether it be codes or clues to puzzles. You still collect the notepad in the Switch version, but it simply does not exist outside that prompt. No button, no touch gesture, nothing brings the thing up. It’s just gone. In fact, all touchscreen elements have been eliminated from this version, and that’s really a shame. You’ll examine a keypad and a nice big visual of the keypad appears, obviously drawn and designed with the intention to be literally pressed on the (3)DS’ second screen but nope, nothing. You just select with the sticks and face buttons. One minor change in the DS to 3DS iteration was all the weapons having little select-able icons at the bottom of the second screen to one singular icon you pressed and held for a little menu (almost like a weapon wheel) of all your weapons. In this new Switch release, you press the right bumper and the whole game pauses while a weapon menu appears on-screen. Not terrible, but it doesn’t flow well at all and is not nearly as quick as previous offerings. You can also quick-switch using the split-pad, but in the late game you’ll end up spamming left or right trying to get to the exact weapon you need in a pinch, and it’s not ideal. My whole experience with this port has been playing it handheld, but it seems blatantly clear that they really built this remaster with TVs in mind. In fact, docking the console and playing the game again for a bit docked and the controls overall felt more responsive. Perhaps that’s a fault of the joycons, but there were times when it felt like my inputs were being eaten, and that simply does not happen in docked mode with a wireless controller.

We’ll return to these changes later, now it’s time to talk about the game itself. Dementium is a fairly short but fine survival-horror shooter. You could probably pick up how things go from the rest of the review thus far, but I’ll recap. You wake up in a dark, seemingly abandoned hospital and have to shoot your way through all sorts of gross enemies while navigating labyrinth-y corridors and solving the occasional puzzle (mostly just figuring out what code to enter into a keypad) to progress. There’s a few fairly simple and easy boss fights. Shoot the weak spots until it dies type stuff. Perhaps the most obvious inspiration for the game is probably Doom 3, as the game swamps its levels in pitch black darkness you must illuminate using a flashlight switch to. It’s all fairly standard, even for the time. Most of the enemies you’ll encounter are what you expect, mostly zombies with some other creepy crawlies in there. One enemy is a floating head that charges you, kinda like a Lost Soul from the Doom series except it’s like a screaming jumpscare too and takes a bunch of shots to die. Regarding difficulty, I played on Normal and found myself mostly breezing through a lot of the rooms. As for the rooms themselves, yep. You are in fact, in a hospital. This is really where the original game was so impressive. Each ‘room’ (and they really are rooms, the DS wasn’t going to be able to handle the whole Half-Life-style environment so) is packed with all sorts of little details and areas to explore. The variety of these rooms begin to dwindle as the game progresses, though. The last few levels do have you re-navigating areas you’ve been through before, but so much of the game just looks samey, anyway. You will see the same hallways and rooms and closets numerous times, just with slightly different texturing each time. It makes sense a hospital would have a uniform layout, but I do wish there was more environment variety Cranking the difficulty up to Hard or even Demented increases the number of enemy spawns and their health. I think your average modern gamer would probably prefer Hard but for the most part, the game sticks to being fluid but tricky and I never really found myself stuck. Took me about 3 hours to beat with lots of exploring, but I think if you were to just keep pushing forward through the environments, it’d only take about two.

But running through the very-samey crunchy hallways this game funnels you through, and I couldn’t stop thinking about how, yes, this is a DS game. Every aspect of this game was designed with the DS in mind, and it’s very evident. But this Switch version seems to scrub the game of this context and history. The game is still good, but all those extra little features and touches that the game had on the (3)DS systems being missing or cut down from their original intention really dissolves some of the magic. During part of this review, I dug up my old ‘new’ 3DS and played some of Dementium Remastered on there and honestly, I kinda wanted to keep playing that version over the Switch version. It just felt like a more complete vision. For preservation and convenience sake, Dementium on Switch is a fine remaster of a good game. If you just want the game with good modern controls on a system you own, go ahead. You’ll have a spooky time.

Thanks to Keymailer and Atooi for supplying us with a review code!

#Dementium