I'm a huge survival horror geek, but there seems something almost sacrilegious about playing horror on a handheld. I've always been convinced that finding a truly frightening game for a handheld system is about as likely as finding a Final Fantasy game with a coherent plot. The guy at the video game store, however, assured me that this was the Holy Grail I'd been searching for. It was terrifying, he said - he actually had to stop playing it because it frightened him so much. That was all the encouragement I needed, and now that I've played Dementium, I can say something I never thought I would - that video game store guy is a huge wuss.

We're all mad here.

   Dementium: The Ward takes place, unsurprisingly enough, in an enormous mental hospital. Although you begin the game locked inside your room, a notepad reading "Why did you do it?" appears in front of your door, along with a key which you can use to exit your room. Since the doors in this asylum apparently lock from the inside, it's rather unsurprising that outside your door is a chaotic scene of bloodstains and overturned vending machines. The Austrian-accented living-tissue-over-exoskeleton guy who says "Come with me if you want to live" is strangely missing, but other than that the picture is complete.

   The control scheme is basic, but it works well. You control the way you're facing with the stylus on the touch screen and move with the D-pad, using the left shoulder button as the action button. The right shoulder button cycles through your inventory, but it's pretty awkward to try and use that while keeping your stylus on the touch screen. Thankfully, it's not necessary as you can also use the touch screen to select your weapon or flashlight. Like Doom 3, it's either or; unlike Doom 3, this doesn't add to the terror, as visibility isn't too bad without the flashlight, so feel free to wrap its batteries in a tube sock to create a super-powerful blunt weapon. Yeah, you WISH.

All build up and no follow through - just like the guy I picked up from the bar last night.

Researchers spent long hours studying the Weekly World News to accurately depict this hospital.

   In my spare time when I'm not gaming, I work in a hospital, so I'm always interested in how hospitals are translated in video games. I've got to say, Dementium's idea of a hospital is pretty accurate, right down to the vents in the walls at eye-level whose only purpose is to act as a superhighway for giant, bloodsucking leeches who want to eat your face. Also, the locked doorways (almost always marked "Maintenance") which, when checked against the map, don't lead anywhere. Every hospital has lots of those installed to give the patients a false sense of security that the equipment they're hooked up to is actually being serviced regularly.

Hey look, it's Samara. I mean, Alessa. I mean, uh...

   Following in the footsteps of pretty much every horror game, movie or story written in the last ten years, there's a little girl who appears at intervals to gesture at you ominously. If the incredibly tired cliché of the evil little girl wasn't enough to totally undermine any amount of terror she might inspire, the fact that in her oversized gown she looks exactly like one of the Little Sisters from Bioshock and seems to be voiced by a forty year-old woman with a penchant for huffing helium will ensure that the words you will use to describe her will be things like "slightly obnoxious" and "mildly amusing".

I came THIS close to public defenestration.

   HERE IS MY FAVORITE PART OF THE GAME: the saving system. You can't actually choose to save at any point in the game, but every once in a while, the word "saving" will appear on your screen, leading you to believe that the game understands that sometimes you forget about saving and then something happens and you die, or accidentally shut off the DS, or you don't notice the low battery light and have to start way back at the beginning of the level and try to remember where all of the items you picked up were. So you're wandering through the game, safe in the knowledge that the autosave is protecting you, when you run into an unexpectedly difficult bit and die. At this point, the game says "Just kidding! The autosave actually only works if you quit! If you die or encounter a boss (just in case you thought you'd be clever and quit a boss fight as soon as your health got low), you have to start again from the beginning of the level, and all the enemies respawn!" and gives you two options: quit, or start again from the beginning of the level. I'd like to believe that there is a third option, which is to go to Texas and throw my DS at the head of the first Renegade Kid employee I find. In fact, I would like to take this moment to formally demand that from this day forward, each copy of Dementium come with a special foam case for the DS to ensure that it doesn't get damaged when the saving system causes you to throw it out of a window in frustration.

This game wears black because that is how it feels inside.

   When you die, the following message appears:

More like Frustration: The Bored, am I right?

   As a first person shooter, Dementium is passable, but as a horror game, it fails miserably. I don't mind not fully understanding the plot at first in games - or even after the first playthrough - but Dementium gives you insights into the plot so slowly that by the time you find something out, you've stopped caring about it. Although papers are strewn all over the place, and the hospital is full of closets and dressers and shelves, there is very little that you can interact with. After having played games that required you to search through rancid bodies in a morgue or collect decaying, diseased bird corpses, you'd think I'd be glad for the opportunity to not interact with anything in the environment that wasn't crucial, but in reality, it makes for a far less immersive experience. The game itself is incredibly linear, which significantly decreases both the scare factor and the interest. And while the plot eventually reveals itself, what I found much more intriguing about the game was the fact that the game was developed by a bunch of guys from Texas, yet there's Japanese on the storage boxes. Shiteimasuka? I'm wishing that you learned more from the Japanese survival horror games that came before Dementium than one random Japanese word, that's what I'm doing.

       ... Lyndsey