➤ High definition dementia 🎮

How brave does it take to make first-person survival horror on Nintendo DS? In our opinion, it is no coincidence that the sales achieved by Dementium and Dementium II were ungenerously miserable. Yet it was a very valid experience, a white fly in the playful offer of the portable console from the double screen, all puppets and cartoons, which shone especially with the second chapter, decidedly more mature than the debut episode in terms of direction. and plot.

Three years later, here is another courageous project: bringing Dementium II to PC, operating the traditional "HD remastering" which, however, in this specific case, meant practically redesigning the entire graphic sector, with polygonal models and settings that they had to go from the original 256 x 192 pixels to 1920 x 1080 and beyond. A job that is anything but simple, which in fact landed on Steam with many problems, so much so that after a few minutes the desire to close the application for manifest unplayability and for the many bugs was great. The graphics have indeed been redesigned and adapted to the new format, but we are still talking about a visual impact that even ten years ago would have been branded as dated., and that doesn't even hold a candle to titles like Half Life 2, which as we know came out in 2004. On the desktop PC (a Phenom II X4 955 with NVIDIA GeForce GTX 770 video card), the frame rate was so high that checking the pointer was impossible, even more so if you tried to use the Xbox 360 controller, which is badly supported. So we took a break, took a deep breath and installed the game on a notebook, where luckily the experience proved to be more easily usable; although here too poorly optimized, given that we are talking about a configuration on which Left 4 Dead 2 runs without any problem with maximum details at 60 frames per second, while Dementium II HD makes a big effort while moving a tenth of the polygons ( if not less), covered with textures that define grainy is little.

Dementium II was a great survival horror for Nintendo DS, but the HD version for PC is bad

For what it's worth

In short, the game is really bad to see, beyond its horror nature. Is this enough to close the file? Almost. The "remastering" was done not let's say with the feet, but with the heels, by people who obviously have no idea what the video games currently available on PC are like.

And we are not referring to triple A productions, because there are many independent teams with the skills and talent necessary to do very well even with low budgets, see the excellent Hard Reset, which, however, you take home with two pennies, or the promising Nether, which we will deal with shortly with a trial of the Early Access version. So it would certainly have been possible to convert Dementium II on PC in a more than dignified way, give it a current cosmetics and let the excellent ideas of the original for Nintendo DS do the rest, putting us in the shoes of that William, a psychiatric patient who must escape from the hospital in which he was locked up to save his family, through dimensional passages which, similar to what is seen in the episodes of Silent Hill, allow him to explore the scenarios in a different way, finding on a plane of reality passages that from on the other hand they look like barred doors. Collecting clues, weapons and items, the man faces armed guards on one side and horrifying monsters on the other, chasing a mad doctor who appears to be playing the role of puppeteer and engages in monstrous experiments inside the facility.

Survival horror vero

By closing one eye (but also both) on the graphics and letting oneself be carried away by a sound capable of creating a great atmosphere (although the "gaps" from one situation to another are not always elegant), inexplicably missing the discreet dubbing in Spanish that we had instead appreciated on Nintendo DS (unfortunately replaced by practically illegible subtitles in our language), the experience of Dementium II HD does not take long to get going and, despite the simplicity of a product created to clear survival horror in first person on a portable console that had never seen any, manages to involve. The woodiness of the movements makes Resident Evil so much, the ammunition of firearms is scarce and it is often necessary to make do with the knife or the clubs, learn to read the movements of the enemies and attack them using the right timing ... all elements to which the fans they had almost given up on this genre, lost in the vortex of that fashion that seems to have transformed the most representative franchises in this sense into simple third person shooter; beautiful without a soul, or at least devoid of what in the first years had made us fall in love. Renegade Kid's work, net of the ignoble conversion, therefore has its own dignity and a story that is worth telling. Maybe when the price will be adjusted to the technical quality of the conversion ...

PC System Requirements

Test Setup

The editorial team uses the ASUS CG8250 Personal Computer
Processor: Intel Core i7 860 at 2.8 GHz
Memory: 8 GB of RAM
Video card: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 670
Operating system: Windows 7 64-bit

Minimum requirements

Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo E6750, AMD Athlon II X2 245e
Scheda video: NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT, AMD Radeon HD 5700
Memory: 2 GB of RAM
Operating system: Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7

Recommended Requirements

Processor: Intel Core i3 2500, AMD Athlon II X4 650
Scheda video: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 285, AMD Radeon HD 5830
Memory: 4 GB of RAM
Operating system: Windows 7 SP1 64 bit

Comment

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4.0

Readers (7)

5.3

Your vote

Dementium II wasn't a hair-pulling survival horror, but it had the enormous merit of clearing a difficult genre on a portable console where there really didn't seem to be room for that type of productions. The PC version keeps the original gameplay intact, simple but engaging, and a structure that is very reminiscent of the first Silent Hill, with the maps to explore and the two floors of reality on which to move to reach otherwise inaccessible areas. Unfortunately the "remastering" work is absolutely bad, defining the "dated" graphics is little, there are a lot of bugs, even serious ones, and big lacks in terms of optimization. Elements that prevent us from advising you on the purchase, to be postponed perhaps until the game will cost a few pennies and keeping in mind its limitations.