Dementium II Preview: Hands Coming Out of Your Face!

Zungre:  Chad, I think a hand is about to come out of my mouth!

Chad:  What the hell are you talking about Zungre?

Zungre:  No seriously, it feels like..blahhhahhlk *garble garble*

Chad: Whoa!  Zungre, can I get a picture of this and send it to the guys who make Dementium II?

Zungre: …Mmmhmm.

Dementium II reminds me of growing up with the most pants-peeingly scary game series ever, Silent Hill.  Why?  Because, like Silent Hill, Dementium II makes use of the unsettling mechanic of constantly thrusting the player between two different disturbing worlds, therefore never letting them establish a sense of familiarity with the environment.  You never feel comfortable.  You never feel safe.

Dementium swaps you between two almost equally horrifying dimensions, an insane asylum, with its muttering, screaming inmates, and an industrial, gore-splattered torment dimension. And the game knows exactly when to switch it up on you for the best scares.

You’re thrusted between the insane asylum world and…

… its even more foreboding, hellish counterpart.  Good luck.

The game also uses some slick scripted events. Right after I took down a disgusting “Chest Maw,” a ghoul with a humongous mouth slit vertically down its abdomen, I saw a poor soul strung up from the ceiling like a side of beef in a meat locker.  As I considered if I had stumbled into the Todd McFarlane section of a dank comic book store, an enormous beast sped through a door, snatched the poor soul up in its shark-like mouth and disappeared.  The whole thing took seconds.

Monsters gotta eat too…

Naturally when I walked through that same area, I was on the lookout for the same huge monster. And that’s when the game ripped me out of the hell dimension back into asylum level, with a loud startling noise. I was playing with headphones and, yeah, I jumped.

Chest Maw

It’s ambitious enough to make an M rated game on the DS, but it’s even more impressive to try to make it a first person shooter. You move forward, backward and strafe left or right with the cross pad and moving the stylus on the touch screen controls which way you’re looking. Controlling your aim with the stylus is refreshing break from console controls, as it feels a lot more like the responsiveness and pin point precision of a keyboard and mouse configuration.

Double tapping the crosspad makes you run and the shoulder button makes you fire or swing your shiv. It takes some getting used to, especially when you’re under the game’s duress, but could ultimately prove to be a really deep control scheme for the DS.

I also got to play through (get my ass kicked by) two of Dementium II’s bosses. The huge beast who ate the dangling corpse returns in a boss fight and this time he not only wants to eat you but spit bile at you as well. Another boss battle features a room lit only by a centered spotlight and a Banshee that screams and flies at you from the room’s dark edges. It’s exhilarating not knowing where she’s going to attack from and the screaming naturally adds to the tension of the confrontation.

“Like a Banshee!”

Dementium 2 makes a bunch of improvements over the first Dementium game. First of all, it’s outdoor areas make it twice as big as the original, and an onscreen map keeps you from getting lost in those many blood soaked corridors. And, hallelujah, you can now hold a weapon and the flashlight at the same time. The monsters are scary enough let alone not being able to see and fight them at the same time.

The game also features some cool puzzles, health restoring items and well placed save points, but the main attraction here is surviving the scares. We’ll see exactly where Dementium 2 makes itself remembered in the great history of survival horror games this February.