Game Review: Dementium II HD

Dementium II HD

 

Game system: Windows (Steam)

Release Date: 17/12/2013

Developer: Renegade Kid, Memetic Games

Publishers: Digital Tribe

I never got the chance to play the original Dementium II on the Nintendo DS, as the original Dementium was rather dissapointing, but with the Windows HD release coming on Steam, I thought it was a time to give the game a chance.

Dementium II puts you in the shoes of a William Redmoor, a protagonist of whom we know nothing about, as you wake up in a cookie cutter prison for the criminally insane, recovering from a brain surgery. The game does not take any time throwing you in an almost too familiar scenario, where you travel between the real world and a twisted, nightmareish version of it (Silent Hill, anyone?). As originally released for the Nintendo DS, this is not necessarily a bad thing, as you shouldn't be expected to take time to watch excruciatingly long cutscenes or read a lot of backstory on a handheld console. In fact, I find this to be one of the game's better aspects; you can easily jump in to kill some monsters and enjoy some horror action. The game manages to fill you in on most of the backstory behind William and his surgery with completely optional letters you find scattered all across the world, which also help build the atmosphere. This is also used as an exposition system to hint at enemies you might encounter in the future and works nicely in this regard.

When up close and personal, some of the monsters actually look very good.

As a sequel, Dementium II has fixed a variety of issues that were hindering the original game. One of the biggest issues I had with the original game were the respawning enemies; every time you came back to an are you already had cleared, the monsters would re-appear. While this has been fixed in Dementium II, the developers tried to "even it out" by adding monsters that you cannot kill. Oftentimes ending in situations where the level is designed around long corridors with maze-like twists, forcing you to run for your life. Other times they can just be avoided without issue. While this mechanic works on its own very well in games like Clock Tower, in Dementium II, it's very disconnected from the general gameplay and just feels tacked on.

Although the game bolsters a good variety of monsters to kill, they're brought down by the lackluster AI, some hitbox issues as well as generally unimaginative designs. While the constantly respawning enemies from the first game are gone, the game sadly features the Smash TV trope (or Painkiller for a more recent example), where you get locked in a room and have to fight waves after waves of monsters before the doors are unlocked again. This can get very tedious with the broken hitboxes and twitchy pain frames some enemies have, making you waste ammunition in addition to the wasted time, luckily these areas are few and far between.

Dementium II comes with a handful of puzzles, as is expected from originally a stulys controlled game. Sadly they are there just for the sake of having puzzles, and do not bring any real meat into the game. There hasn't been proper effort to make the puzzles intriguing or even remotely challenging, and they just end up feeling like extra work, especially when you can see the solution to each puzzle upfront.

Sadly the puzzles are only there because it's a genre trope.

The game features some backtracking and keycard-based gameplay (door codes, items to use on special doors, etc.), but it's still very much a linear progression all the way through. Fortunately, Dementium II has a few different types of areas to explore. In addition to the prison, you'll get to see some snowy villages, caverns and service tunnels. Gameplay-wise, the game comes as standard as they get; you get a variety of weapons to kill monsters with, ranging from knives and bone saws to shotguns, assault rifles and explosives like dynamite. The blatantly obvious medical kits and the less common adrenaline syringe, which gives you a temporarily speed boost, are also there.

As far as the game's contributions to horror games, it's fairly predictable with monsters strapped in chains, covered in teeth in places they should not be. The monsters and locations are nothing you will remember after finishing the game, but do their job well enough for a budget title. Dementium II still manages to pull of some, at least remotely distressing atmospheres with its use of sound and (cheesy) imagery. The music and sound design is not commendable, but it is there, following the tropes of standard piano driven melodies and footsteps heard in the background. Sadly the developers opted for a dynamic combat music system, which just ends up being more jarring than they possibly intended. Every enemy is treated as its own encounter, so more often than not you end up hearing the music stop and restart multiple times, even in the same room, as the enemies do not necessarily engage in combat at the same time. This also works to ruin some of the tension as sometimes the music tells you if a monster is around the corner.

This new HD version of Dementium II has been built on the Unity engine and is fairly well optimized. It's lacking in the visual settings as expected; you only have a few pre-set resolutions to choose from and you're limited to a slider between "Fastest" to "Fantastic" for the visual quality, hardly enough for a PC game. While this is a standard Unity feature, I wish the developers would have given us more control over the settings. The audio seems generally done well enough, considering it's originally for the Nintendo DS. The level architecture seems identical with the original DS version, but every texture and most of the models have been remade to bring the game to the PC. While the Nintendo DS roots are obvious from the low-poly level architecture, the new textures in addition to some decent lighting effects translate fairly well to the PC. Some areas do look obviously low fidelity, but in general I think the game manages to look very solid.

The relaxing snowfall helps bring atmosphere to the game.

The game only has a single "save profile", but stores a save for each of the save locations (which interestingly enough are glowing red mirrors, ring any bells?), so you have a fair amount of progress backlog. I did encounter some game breaking bugs, like trying a door puzzle without having the combination, then having the door no longer be operable after obtaining the combination. Just make sure not to re-save in locations all the time and you should be fine. Additionally, it seems like the game binds menu to "ESC" by default, but it doesn't register as a keypress in-game. I got around this by binding the menu to F1. A fairly big mistake as far as controls go.

Sadly, I found out that during the five hours that it takes to beat the game, the game never kicks on a higher gear and the storyline exposition seems to be very bare bones: after all is said and done, you end up with more questions than answers. In fact, it feels like a fan-made horror modification to a popular game, rather than a proper horror game on its own. It's clear it wanted to be the Silent Hill of the Nintendo DS, but what we ended up with is something more close to the Half-Life 2 mod Grey. In the end, the game is a clumsy, budget horror game with apparent flaws and a complete lack of new ideas, which only help drown it in the sea of other mediocre horror games. It's not a particularly bad game, but doesn't bring anything new to the table, and as such, I can only recommend it if you know what you're getting into.

Score: 2.0/5
Review by Daedolon 28/12/13.

Game Review: Penumbra: Overture

 Penumbra: Overture

 




Game system: Windows, Linux, Macintosh

Release Date: 30/03/2007

Developer: Frictional Games

Publishers: Frictional Games / Paradox Interactive / Strategy First, Inc. / Noviy Disk / Got Game Entertainment / Lexicon Entertainment / 1C Company

            







Penumbra: Overture is a first person survival-horror game developed by Frictional Games (which are now famous for having made Amnesia: The Dark Descent). It is the first part in the Penumbra trilogy.

       
You play the rôle of Phillip, who after having received a letter from his presumably long dead father, travels to Northern Greenland due to the clues given with the letter, in order to try and find out more about his father. He ends up in an abandoned mine in which the game takes place.

It only took me a short moment to realize what was Penumbra: Overture's greatest strength: from the gorgeous graphics viewed in first person, the realistic pacing, the fitting soundtrack and sound effects, you will be completely immersed into the game's world right away.

Controls also add a lot to the immersion and to making you feel as if you were the protagonist : a lot of simple movements, such as turning a wheel, pushing a crate or opening a door, have to be realisticly imitated using the mouse (which makes me wish the game was ported to a console with a motion controller).

The game is divided into seperate segments, all of them composed of long maze-like corridors and a few rooms. The layout of each segment is in the same style, which I found a little repetitive by the end of the game even though texturing and architecture differs from segment to segment.
Once you reach the following segment you can not go back to the previous one.
Each segment has its sets of puzzles to solve and the same monsters to deal with.       

Regarding monsters, there are overall few of them, the developers clearly prefered to focus on immersion, puzzles and storytelling over action. However, they get more numerous as you progress through the game.

       
These monsters can be be divided into two categories : dog-like creatures that I will call « lurkers », which wander around and which you have the choice to either avoid or kill; as well as spiders and giant worms, that I will categorize as the « runner » type.

       
The « lurkers » sadly didn't pose much of a threat to me, I played on the normal difficulty skill, and I was quickly able to figure out their attacking patterns and weaknesses, making them easy preys to the different melee weapons at my disposal.
However they can kill you more easily on hard so I'd recommend playing on that skill setting even on a first playthrough to experience them as they were meant to be.

       
Though like I said you do not have to kill them, if you keep your distance and be careful enough by making little noise and turning off your flashlight or torch, they won't notice you.
The game advices you to fear them and to prefer avoiding them, but I found that killing them was always the best solution in order to be able to focus on solving the puzzles.

       
The type of action with the « runners » is at the opposite as the « lurkers ». With lurkers the game wants you to keep a slow and quiet pace or to try to find another route; « runners » will trigger faster paced straightforward chase sequences (which can be compared to what you can find in Devilman, a Japan exclusive survival-horror game for PSX, or to Silent Hill: Shattered Memories).
If a « runner » catches up to you, in most cases it's a sure death, so you have to keep running while avoiding obstacles or finding ways to block the path behind you.      

      
The concepts behind those two type of action are good, but I found the execution flawed in both cases: you're supposed to fear the « lurkers » by remaining silent and avoiding them, but killing them ends up being the best solution. « Runners » are a bit more interesting because they offer more varied action, but this action is ruined by heavy trial&error with a lot of deaths.
Plus, the fact that you're given unlimited continues that make you respawn right before the beginning of the chase renders null any fear of death you're supposed to have from them.

Gameplay-wise, puzzles are the most interesting point of the game. There is a lot of variety in them : from physic puzzles, to combining different items, or turning a set of valves in the right order with given clues, each one is different.

       
What makes them so interesting is their realism. In Penumbra you will have nothing like using a blazon to move a clock. Here, they are realistic in design (for example the way you have to build your own explosive using different ingredients) and also because they are directly linked to surrounding environment (like having to turn on the power generato of a whole segment): they make sense.

       
This is quite notable for a survival-horror game, or even for adventure games in general, and it is another point that helps immersing the player into the game's world.

    
However, I can't help but to nitpick on a couple of puzzles. Regarding the puzzle I mentionned in which you have to mix different ingredients to make an explosive, you have to use that explosive to blow up a barrel of TNT. However, the player is provided with dynamite and a room nearby even has small bombs that you can carry around; yet you can use neither to blow up the TNT barrel. Only the explosive you have to make yourself will work.

      
A similar thing happens later on in the game as well, again with an explosive you have to make; if you throw it away on the boulders you want to explode, it WILL explode but kill you at the same time. You have to put it on the boulders, use a fuse and your lighter and that however won't kill you even if you stand closer to where you would have thrown it from.

Again, this is nitpicking, but the fact that I'm nitpicking about it proves several things. It proves that overall the game succeeds in making realistic puzzles with sense to them, because these two explosive related puzzles stand out as being « flawed » while this « flaw » is common in the vast majority of adventure games. It also proves that overall the game succeeds in immersing the player, as only these two minor points cut down the immersive experience I was going through, which means that the rest doesn't. Finally, it also proves how difficult it is to make a game with good immersion and that Frictional Games did an overall great job with that.

To summarize, Penumbra: Overture is lacking quality in terms of action but it has smart puzzles.

By the end of it, the story has given more questions than answers, but that's probably partly due to the episodic concept of the trilogy (each episode is a direct sequel to the previous one).

However it will immerse you incredibly well into a creepy and disturbing world; and that alone makes it worth playing.

 In Penumbra: Overture, you don't just play a video game, you experience an adventure.

Score : 3,5/5
Review by Ness 26/11/12.