If you were to ask a bunch of Nintendo DS owners what their favorite horror game for the system might be, a lot of them would probably point to the Dementium series or maybe Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors (for the sake of brevity, I refer to that game as 999. While those are excellent choices, I would say a relatively unknown title known as Theresia is one of the scariest games on the Nintendo DS. Check out the trailer below for a taste of the unsettling creepiness that this game provides.
Published in the West by Aksys Games, the same company that brought us 999, Theresia is a sort of hybrid between a first person dungeon crawler and a visual novel. For this reason I am not going to get too much into the plot. There really is not a lot of gameplay here so experiencing the story for yourself is the main draw. What I will tell you is that you play the role of a young woman named Leanne who finds herself in a dim room with no memories of how she got there – or of anything else. You must explore the area and solve puzzles to make your way through what turns out to a sizable prison facility complete with torture chambers and burial chambers. As you progress bits of your memory return and memories of a hard fought war, development of a bioweapon and a woman covered in blood.
The visuals are admittedly a bit rough. This is a DS port of what was originally a mobile game and by that I am not talking about smart phones as we know them today. This is an older title built for older hardware and it shows. But if you can get past the visuals you will find that Theresia delivers one of the creepiest stories to grace the Nintendo DS library.
