For all of the amnesiac patients that appear in video games, you'd think that there would be more of them running around in the real world. Maybe Uncle Floyd wakes up one day and can't remember anything about who he is, and has to piece his life together with clues strewn about his home so that he can ultimately make it to work as the local Health Inspector. Regardless of how little it happens in the real world, amnesia still makes for a good hook in video games and lies at the heart of Theresia: Dear Emile.

You awaken in a cold, dark, locked room. Your memories are gone and as you explore your surroundings, you find that traps have been laid for you, or someone else. All you have to help figure out who you are and how you got here are your wits and the strange, barbed pendant around your neck. The game's opening isn't exactly new to gaming, particularly adventure gaming, but the game’s combination of moody visuals, sparse music and well done cut scenes give this tale of memory hunting a sense of malevolent urgency.

The game adheres to the common mechanics of adventure games in that you'll navigate from room to room, investigating your surroundings, picking up items and using them to progress through your environment. Where the game strikes a different chord is with the many, varied traps lying around. Selecting the hand icon and randomly tapping on items via the touchscreen is a good way to get yourself killed in very short order. Knives, needles, electricity, fire, collapsing rubble, bugs and other manner of destructive elements all await those who plow their way through adventure games by just tapping on everything in sight, hoping for the best. Luckily, by choosing to view items first, by tapping them with the eye icon, you can avoid many of the traps, however even with looking at everything ahead of time you'll still take your knocks now and again. Thankfully, healing elixirs abound to give you a quick medicinal boost and if you still really want to poke that corpse, even though you know something bad is going to happen, you can find plenty of 2 x 4s around that will absorb the trap damage.

The game sports a somewhat uneven approach to navigation and exploration. While in a room, you'll be presented with hand painted environments to explore, all of which give off a creepy, mournful vibe that only several floors of bloated corpses can provide. Once you leave the rooms though, you wander hallways that look like they came straight from a 1990 first person shooter. As you walk down hallways, giant, pixilated icons will show you doors you can enter and items you can investigate taking away from the well constructed atmosphere of the rooms and items you interact with.

Even with this disparity when navigating, the game does an excellent job of providing a sense of dread throughout your adventure. It definitely earns its “Mature” rating, but there are no monster closets, no shambling dead that chase you from place to place, just rooms that existed for vile purposes, bodies littering the halls, and the notion that some very, very bad things went down.

It uses a sparse audio palette to ratchet up the dread, with haunting music, and equally as important, stretches of utter silence, to give the entire experience weight. Even the hint system, a barbed pendant that you can press into your flesh to help get your thoughts in order, provides a disturbing audio experience of multiple whispering voices and a faint cry of painful pleasure. When memories are uncovered, the cut scenes are well done and help give just enough context to let you piece together what's going on, but not so much that you don't want to keep moving forward.

As with most old school adventure games, your path to making progress involves finding items, and using said items, sometimes combining the items in ways no rational person would ever think of. The game tends to shy away from making you use a bowling ball to operate a bulldozer, but due to the strange surroundings you'll still find plenty of odd puzzles. Luckily they're rarely infuriating and if you take the time to think things out, you can come to a solution fairly quickly. It also does a nice job of paring down your inventory for you so that you don't have three dozen items that could possibly be combined.

Like other adventure games, there's also plenty of backtracking which is hampered by both your slow walking speed when out in the hallways and the inability to take notes or annotate the map in any way. There is a map available, and it does a nice job of showing you rooms that you've been in, complete with a picture and a list of the items you've obtained there, but as good as it is, the map is useless for showing you doors that you had to bypass due to locks or other obstacles. Finding your way back to these doors becomes a matter of wandering and memory searching. The ability to use the touchscreen to make notes on the map would have been a tremendous help.

Once you've regained all of your memories and finished the story, a new story told from the perspective of Dr. Martel opens up, to further explain the events that took place prior to the events in the first story. The two stories mesh together nicely and help offset the inherent lack of replayability in adventure games by providing plenty of content to experience.

Theresia: Dear Emile does a great job of providing old school adventure elements with striking visuals, great sound and a breadcrumb approach to storytelling that will have you up far longer at night than you had planned, as you work to uncover more memories, or just see what's in the next room. Were opportunities for a more streamlined approach missed? Absolutely, but these missed opportunities shouldn't keep adventure game fans, or fans of excellent storytelling from missing out on one of the creepiest, most atmospheric games released on the DS in quite some time.

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