One of the few Nintendo DS horror games is making its seasonally approrpiate debut on PC later this month

The Nintendo Dual Screen! Or Nintendo DS, as it was actually known. There’s a console that has practically no relevance to this site, except for right now, because of a game called Dementium: The Ward. For those that haven’t heard of it, this is one of the incredibly few horror games available on the handheld console, nowadays a bit of a cult classic because who on earth thought it would be a good idea to do that. It was also pitched as a Silent Hill game, a point we’ll come back to because the big thing here is that it’s making its way to Steam later this month.

Here’s the concept: you wake up in a hospital, you’ve got no memories, and there’s nasty monsters you have to defend yourself from. On the original DS, you had to use the touch screen to look around, and you needed to use the D-Pad to move. This obviously sounds like a bit of a tricky control scheme, though it looks like it’ll be your standard first-person affair in the PC release. One thing in the DS’ favour that will be missing however is that you could also write down notes in a notebook using the touchscreen.

I do wonder if these changes will rob the game of something. It’s not a completely new port, the game is already available on Switch and PS4/PS5, so these changes have already taken place, but I question if the lack of friction from the finicky sounding DS controls makes the experience flatter. Though, I do appreciate that it’s generally retained its original visuals. Death to revisionist remasters!

Anyway, that Silent Hill connection! A few years back Jools Watsham, the co-founder of Renegade Kid, developer of Dementium, shared that the studio had pitched the game to Konami about making it a Silent Hill entry. According to Watsham, Konami were “kind enough to meet with us, but the meeting only lasted a few minutes and ended with their [representative] saying they wouldn’t let a team like us handle the Silent Hill license.” Rough! But looking at Dementium, even if it is a cult classic, it’s probably for the best ultimately.

Mostly I think this thing is a neat little curiosity, as it’s not very often you see DS games ported off of the console given the complexity of adapting dual screen gameplay. Normally you get remakes like The World Ends With You. In any case, if you’re interested in picking up the seasonally appropriate Dementium: The Ward, it’s due out later this month on October 27th via Steam.