Desolate Roads is a short horror game in which you run out of gas in the middle of nowhere. Now you need to search the desolate roads for something that can help.

It’s structured like a standard survival horror puzzle – down one path you find a chained up gate, down another path you find bolt-cutters that you can’t take yet because they’re stuck in a rusted vise, and so on.

As you explore, you get text messages that slowly shed light on the surrounding events. At other points, fiery phantasms materialize and chase you, with your only recourse being to banish them with the help of the radios in nearby cars.

These are all neat ideas, but unfortunately it ends up feeling tedious instead of scary.

Desolate Roads is a short game that takes under an hour to complete, and there are no save points. You really only need a handful of items, which would make it even shorter, so it makes up for this by having it set in a large area that requires a lot of walking to reach any specific spot. These key areas are easy enough to find, being at the end of clear paths, but they require you to spend a lot of time slowly walking to reach them.

That’s probably intentional to build up the atmosphere, but since enemy encounters are scripted, you spend most of the time without anything happening.

Now, my first playthrough resulted in an early death, because I walked in the opposite direction at the start of the game and simply died. On my second playthrough, I went in the right direction and started paying attention to which items were where and figuring out what I’d need to do. I missed the first item, so nothing happened at all as I explored each path, but once I figured out what I’d missed, I was right on track to complete the rest – except the radio mechanic glitched out, so I had no way to survive the first enemy encounter.

By my third playthrough, I more or less knew exactly what item to use where, but I was so tired of trudging down those same roads with nothing happening that the monsters only filled me with the dread that if I failed, I’d have to do this all over again.

As you can see, my specific experience with the game colored my impressions. If I hadn’t spent so much time on my second playthrough only to run into a glitch and need to start over, I might have enjoyed it more. It does have some neat ideas, and the core gameplay isn’t bad.

But there’s just too much time spent on those desolate roads, and the atmosphere isn’t strong enough to keep the tension high.

Last month, we talked about the announcement of a Dementium: The Ward remaster for the Nintendo Switch.

At the time, I said that as part of this October’s celebration of spooky games, I might play either that or the 3DS version I already had. Well, I decided to play the 3DS version, Dementium Remastered.

My first thought upon starting up Dementium was, “Oh, this game will benefit from having a right stick to control the camera,” since camera controls were otherwise relegated to either the face buttons or the touchscreen on my old 3DS. Nevertheless, I eventually got used to using the stylus to aim.

You also use the stylus to write notes in your notebook, and that’s one of its best features. I loved actually writing down notes about puzzles, lock combinations, etc. in the notebook, so it’s a shame that mechanic is presumably cut from the new remaster. It’s a small touch, but one that makes the game feel a bit more unique.

Combat in Dementium plays like a first-person shooter, with several weapons you obtain along the way. You can’t hold a flashlight and a weapon at the same time, so a considerable amount of tension is added from needing to quickly switch to a weapon when you see an enemy approaching. I found it beneficial to avoid certain enemies, especially since you can only use healing items right when you find them.

Bosses are especially dangerous. Without being able to bring healing items to a boss fight with you, you really need to stay alert. One boss fight was so frustrating it nearly soured my view on the whole game.

Dementium is split into chapters, and the chapters are pretty much separate from one another. At first, I assumed I would be revisiting areas often, but that’s not the case. Backtracking is minimal and mostly occurs within the same chapter. You might see a locked box at the start of a chapter, and then spend the chapter finding what you need in order to unlock it, before moving on to a different area for the next chapter.

The backtracking can be somewhat annoying, though, because the map doesn’t mark blocked hallways. It was common for me to follow what looked like a path back to where I wanted to return to, only to find it blocked and need to take a long way around.

This factors into another flaw – the level design is kind of boring. There are a lot of areas where sections are blocked off so there’s only one way to go, and the small number of puzzles means most rooms are either empty or contain only health and/or ammo. The story is minimal and difficult to follow, too.

While this might sound like I’ve done nothing but complain about Dementium all this time, I actually had a decent time with it. The gameplay wasn’t stellar, but it wasn’t bad, either. And the audio design was great; I often could tell what enemies were in a room with me just from the sounds I heard, and could plan accordingly. That aforementioned frustrating boss also had me using audio cues to determine when I should act.

Dementium is the sort of game I found to be just fine. I’m not jumping up and down to recommend it to people, but I still enjoyed playing it. Maybe someday we’ll take a look at its sequel, Dementium II.