2007's "Dementium: The Ward" is a more-or-less forgotten little gem of the survival-horror sub-genre. Released on Nintendo's hand-held DS console, the game was a very good example of just what the hardware was capable of pushing, offering a rather engrossing (if not problematic) 3D first-person horror experience that made good use of the DS and it's features- notably the dual screens and touch-screen features. Was it a perfect game? No. Was it fun? Oh, for sure! Essentially, you play a character who awakens in a dark and disturbing hospital, populated by dreadful creatures, ghostly spirits and the occasional human. Using only your wits and the few weapons you can find, you set out to try and solve puzzles, battle creatures and escape this Hellish location... The storyline is really non-existent for much of the game. It's much more an overt exercise in atmospheric horror and puzzle solving- style over substance you could say. But I don't think there's anything wrong with that, really. While games have on the whole become more "cinematic" with deeper and more complex story lines and characters, sometimes it's fun to just put a game in and play through some fun, trippy levels without having to worry too much about those things. It's almost quaint now, I suppose, but sometimes... you just wanna run around creepy hallways while shooting up zombies and monsters. Not to say there's no story. It's just almost more of a borderline after-thought. Controls are relatively straight-forward, although I do find them extremely fulfilling thanks to the implementation of simultaneous button and touch-screen functions while playing. It's an interesting conjunction that I think works quite well with the first-person perspective. Doing things like using buttons to walk while using the touch screen to move your flashlight around (side note, the real- time flashlight effect was quite amazing for the time) feels relatively natural and it helps give the game a quicker pacing than if it had just relied on button-pressing. The graphics are quite nice for a 2007 hand-held release, reminding me very much of old First Person Shooters you'd see in the late 90's on consoles like the Nintendo 64 or Sony Playstation. The level of detail is fairly good- monsters are adequately gooey and icky, human characters are well built and animated and the creepy, dark hallways you spend much of the game running around are competently well- designed and eerie. The real time lighting effects are also really, really interesting. And thankfully the frame rate is always extremely smooth during gameplay, so there's no lag to worry about. (Although pre-rendered movie sequences do sometimes suffer weird frame-rate drops.) A very solid presentation for the time, even if it hasn't held up particularly well. The sound and music on the other hand... Well, at the graphics looked nice! Kidding aside, the sound is a very mixed bag. The limited music comes across as sounding extremely dated and low- quality which I found pretty shocking. Recorded dialog from your limited encounters with other people is almost always blown-out and poorly mixed (with music and sounds sometimes drowning out the dialog) on top of the somewhat sub-par voice acting. And I found that the sound quality itself for effects was uniformly poor. A lot of sounds that suddenly get really blown-out and suffer that "fuzzy" distortion if you try to raise the volume above a moderate level. The gameplay is also somewhat mixed. Mainly in that while fun, it can become monotonous at times due to a lack of variety. It's really the same basic formula with each "level" with almost no variance to speak of. Run around a few rooms, fight a few monsters, find a few clues, and then solve a touch-screen based puzzle. Rinse and repeat a couple times, and advance to the next level. It's entertaining at first, but it doesn't break formula enough to make you want to finish it all in one or two sittings. You'll find yourself wanting to only beat a level or two at a time before giving it a break, which does hurt the atmosphere of the game a bit. It's hard to fully engross yourself in the well-crafted atmospheric thrills because you'll only be playing for maybe a half-hour at a time. Those issues being said, this is still a very solid game. It's pretty to look at, controls well and has some great uses of atmosphere and visual design. With some tweaking, I think a remastered version on a more modern hand-held console (Ex. the New 3DS) could become a modern survival-horror classic. But as it stands, it's a good game. Just a slightly troubled one. I give "Dementium: The Ward" a very solid 7 out of 10. Worth checking out for horror fans for sure.