Pleasant surprises end up being more than pleasant because pleasant surprises are so few and far between -- Dementium: The Ward is a pleasant surprise. The first-person survival horror game for the Nintendo DS does the best it can with the hardware's technology and could, at a minimum, be a serious break-out sleeper hit. When you find out Renegade Kid will have finished this game with a development cycle of 11 months, with only three internal guys and five external guys working on it, you'll be surprised. The reason they could pull this off is because these developers are all veterans of the N64 and were "firing on all cylinders out of discipline" knowing how to work with the development software, for them the trick was how to incorporate the stylus, but it all came out just fine.

The most shocking thing you'll notice about Dementium is how smooth it runs. It uses the Metroid Prime Hunters control scheme, but because the pacing is slower than MPH, the concept feels better. Left hand stays on the control pad with one finger on the left bumper for action, right hand uses stylus on the bottom screen. The top screen is uncluttered standard FPS fare. The bottom screen has a heart monitor which gives a standard thud-thud when you are at normal health and gets more rapid as you take damage. Currently the heart beat can't be turned down or silenced, the developers said that will put that option into the final game -- listening to a heart beat for that long would drive you Edgar Allen Poe telltale crazy. There is a simple action button when you need to open doors (loading times are nil) and an easily accessible notepad when you need to remember codes or keep notes to figure out puzzles. Items are easily selected by tapping them on an inventory tray which runs along the bottom of the screen. The only thing is that the flashlight is so important to seeing more than a few feet in front of you that a quick hotkey on the bottom menu would be nice -- especially because you can't use the flashlight as a melee weapon (hello Doom 3 irritation all over again). The map is great showing you where you've been and which doors are locked and unlocked. The game takes approximately 7 hours to complete, so figure a few extra hours if you take your time. Puzzles include stuff like finding a code written in blood that you'll need to input into a door and searching around a room for notes to play on a toy piano. Dementium looks like it'll be a great unflinching M rated addition to the DS library. The story is still under wraps, but if the story is as tight as the controls, this'll be a winner for the independent games movement.