Dementium: The Ward launched on Steam just in time for this week’s Scream Fest, with a 40% discount that’s got to be pretty tempting for anyone who enjoyed the horror game nearly 20 years ago on the Nintendo DS. One Steam reviewer calls Dementium “a bit like Silent Hill crossed with Doom 3,” before zeroing in on an even more specific comparison: “Afraid of Monsters crossed with Doom 3, for those of you who have dabbled in Half-life horror mods.”
Dementium may not be an all-timer horror game, but it was a bit clever, a bit different, and seeing it pop up on Steam got me thinking about just how many games developed for the Nintendo DS fit that description. And equally, how few are playable anywhere but the DS, even 15 years after Nintendo stopped making new handhelds.
But it’s a weirdly short list given just how many bangers came out on the DS over the course of its life. Even setting aside Nintendo’s own stuff, there are some stone cold classics that deserve to be perma-installed on every Steam Deck. Where’s Meteos, from Rez/Lumines creator Tetsuya Mizuguchi? Where are the Professor Layton puzzle games? Square Enix’s 2000s Tokyo fashion time capsule The World Ends With You?
Bangai-O Spirits, one of the last action masterpieces from Ikaruga developer Treasure? Hotel Dusk, a detective mystery that still gets brought up every time a new great in that genre drops?
Ninja Gaiden: Dragon Sword? Okamiden? Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey? Atlus has sold millions of copies of its RPGs on Steam at this point, yet it’s still leaving obvious ones like that out in the cold!
I’m not even venturing into “hidden gem” territory here; the DS’s archive of great, or at least weird and interesting, games truly runs deep. There are quite a few more 3DS games on Steam than DS ones, perhaps because its more advanced 3D graphics were a bit easier to polish up for an HD re-release. But even as Steam has become the obvious place to build a decade-spanning library of games ported to PC for safekeeping, both systems remain underrepresented, which is particularly disappointing given the surge in handheld PC gaming in the last couple years.
We’re only going to see more and more people playing their Steam libraries away from their desks in the next couple years. And I think the PC audience is more primed than ever to enjoy games that look like they cost the GDP of a small country to make or are wobbly and ugly but just as brilliant. No system ever did the latter better than the DS.
I even think that Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood—a Sonic the Hedgehog RPG made by Bioware with some of the worst music you’ve ever heard—should be ported to PC. For history’s sake, y’know?
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