Poison Control (Switch)
In Poison Control’s fuchsia-soaked version of Hell you won’t find much fire or brimstone, nor are the people tormented there being punished for their sins. Instead, the personal hells you find belong to women who harbor dangerous delusions, some unable to rest in the afterlife while others are struggling with their issues back on Earth still. What constitutes a delusion can vary wildly though. Some of these Belles’ Hells are formed by mundane problems like a girl who is a little too into eating sweets or another who gets a little too excited when she finds a dirty magazine, but then on the other hand you have ones formed from murderous intent, awful abuse, and some fairly warped mindsets like a little girl who believes the only way she can get her dead dog back is to fill the afterlife to bursting with even more dead creatures. It falls on your shoulders to clear away these dangerous delusions, since your only path to heaven now is to clean up Hell.
Poison Control lets you pick whether your protagonist is male or female, but whichever you go with, you’ll still find the game starts with you having just died. Before your character can even get their bearings in the underworld, a creature called a Klesha consumes your body but not in a way that robs you of it. Instead, this Klesha now manifests as a helper called Poisonette, the two of you sharing your physical form and able to change the degree of control you have to tap into her poisonous powers. Both you and Poisonette are missing your memories though, but neither of you wants to spend more time in Hell, meaning you start listening to radio broadcasts to find out when new Belles’ Hells are formed and heading out to clear them away to earn credit for a possible pass to Heaven. Poisonette is an amusing companion, although the more fascinating tale surrounds a different person clearing Hells in a similar way mostly because of the depth it reveals later in the adventure. Up until then, Poison Control’s main characters mostly exist for humor and the banter does make the adventure more entertaining, especially since your usually quiet character can get in on it from time to time. At points in this third-person shooter Poisonette will ask for your opinion or prompt an observation from you, there being three options to pick from that can strengthen your relationship with her and in turn potentially unlock new boosts to your strength. However, you might just want to pick the funnier or more empathetic option just to see the reactions, and thankfully this isn’t the only way to grow your strength so you don’t feel locked into selecting certain responses to succeed.
The Belles’ Hells do feel like they had a lot of room for interesting story-telling, but despite your work being to help clear away the delusions of women both living and dead, you’re usually not interacting with a person’s story too closely. Memories can be found and listened to so you come to understand whose hell you’re in and there can be fun ways a persons issues manifest within their dedicated stage. One girl is utterly obsessed with a mascot character and so large statues of it are littered about and enemies even dress up like it. A greedy girl’s hell involves you needing to earn a certain amount of cash to continue, and some Hells are spaced out well so you do get a full little narrative like in one where you gradually learn about a judo club’s little love triangle. You do sometimes technically help the woman out by finding an important item to set her mind straight and sometimes Poisonette has some choice words to snap them out of their mindset, but other times the best you’ll get is the radio broadcasts that talk about each Hell assuring you afterwards that everything was suddenly solved when you didn’t really impact it in any way. Each Hell having a tiny story attached to it does make playing a new level more fascinating, but while it’s fine to not get a satisfying resolution to ones with a comedic plot, the more tragic ones do feel let down by how disposable each level’s tale needs to be to pack over twenty of them in.
When you’re in a stage, most of your focus is going to be on cleaning up poison and shooting down baddies. Poison coats the floors of the different Hells, meaning that while their appearance can range from a corrupted school to a fantasy food land, you’re always going to have large stretches of pink, red, or purple splattered across the ground. Poison hurts to stand in, but it’s also fairly easy to clean up, the player pressing a button to send out Poisonette to start the job. Moving her around with the control stick, any space she covers will be purged of poison once you call her back, and if you make a full loop back to your character, it will clear any poison within the border made by Poisonette’s path. Gradually clearing away this embodiment of a girl’s toxic thoughts is certainly satisfying on a simple level, many levels even making the overall goal being to clear a certain percentage of the poison mire. Later levels do start to make the poison much more dangerous though, some poison pools reappearing while other stages make sure the battle arena puts pressure on you so it’s hard to juggle fighting monsters with making the floor safe to even stand on. Clean up even contributes heavily to earning money, gaining experience to level up with, or uncovering treasures like the three Poison Gems in each level. If you manage to get all of a level’s Poison Gem, that hell’s associated Belle will be unlocked as an unusual sort of equipment. Depending on which girl you receive help from, you can utilize different weapons or receive passive boosts to thinks like strength, defense, or cash drops.
The shooting in Poison Control is where the more active and exciting action should be found, but it doesn’t always get there due to its often simple nature. The player can equip a few guns to use, the Deliriants being limited ammo guns that you likely won’t rely on due to their rarity while your other guns can all be refilled either by waiting or purging poison. There is a decent range of shot types so there’s actually thought involved in which guns to go with. You have a reliable normal shot with Poisonette herself, but later Belles can provide you weapons like a shotgun blast, an inaccurate but rapid fire shot, and even a bomb shot you can’t use often. Building up your preferred weapons and upgrading them does give a gratifying sense of growth across the adventure, but the enemies you face aren’t often asking too much of you. There is a decent variety, you’ll come to learn your preferred weapons for chasing down running beasts, getting around a warrior’s shield, or taking out floating foes before they unleash powerful attacks, but it doesn’t feel like Poison Control places them well to be consistently dangerous. The most exciting skirmishes are often large rooms filled with poison and tons of enemies making management not so straightforward, and while bosses can sometimes be easily handled, there are definitely some tough fights to be had where Poison Control manages to lay on the pressure enough to make up for the frequent placid stretches of exploration where enemies barely trip you up.
Poison Control definitely has an excellent soundtrack though, the tunes helping to pump things up even when the play doesn’t exactly encourage being overly active much of the time. Other times the soundtrack can be more subdued so it doesn’t end up feeling inappropriate, but tracks like Bullet of the Soul really bring the energy when the electronic rock is allowed to let loose. While the music brings its A game, the technical performance isn’t always so hot. There are times close to the end of the game it would hitch for seconds at a time despite there being no apparent jump in complexity to what it needed to display and enemies will disappear from view much closer than you might expect. Sometimes when moving Poisonette the camera can get stuck inside a wall, that being the only moment where technical issues seemed to really harm the flow of the action, but otherwise it is pretty easy to press forward to hear the latest level’s story while doing some decent poison-clearing busywork.
THE VERDICT: Poison Control’s shooting is only so-so, the customization making it a bit more interesting and the poison purging giving you more to do in levels that don’t often bring the heat with their enemy forces. When it does muster up the right level of pressure though, the battles are invigorated a fair deal, meaning the game doesn’t need to lean solely on a sterling soundtrack and its collection of short stories to hold your interest. The gun play does need stronger opposition for sure, but it’s still easy to fall into an entertaining enough loop of popping into the next Hell to see what strange concept is at play.
And so, I give Poison Control for Nintendo Switch…
An OKAY rating. The shooting action didn’t need to shine for Poison Control to be a clearly good game. If Poisonette and the player had a deeper story to tell, if the Belles tied to each hell let you get more involved in clearing their delusions, or if those people you help connected more to the game beyond being a level and an equipable, Poison Control is the kind of game that could get by on its concepts and narrative alone. The poison clearing scratches a simple and effective itch of wanting to wipe away a mess, and while it’s not often difficult to do so, the times the game lays out a battle arena where the gunk and the enemies are both consistent dangers really shine. A stronger need to balance clean up and combat could make things more consistently thrilling, and there are ideas like the regenerating goop and foes who create poison puddles that could maybe do with more exploration or cleaner implementation. Generally though, more dangerous mixes of enemies and an expansion to the stable of monsters would likely help invigorate things most, especially if the game could more often tie them to a specific Hell’s delusion. Seeing enemies dressed to match is cute, but the beast monsters first appear in the level about the girl mourning her dog and it seems for a second that they could be tied to the theme only for them to roll into a consistent cast of baddies. That Poison Control still manages to be decent mostly speaks for all of its elements beyond the basics of its gun play, but it doesn’t seem like a lost cause since ideas like cultivating your own preferred set of weapons work because the game has a good sense for where to limit you and where to grant you strength.
Poison Control feels like it needed more fleshing out. A lot of its ideas would work in a more full-bodied game where things connected to each other well, but the adventure still has its charm thanks to Poisonette’s light-hearted interactions and the moments it does get more serious have good writing to back them up. It still can’t shake off the repetitiveness that comes from its shooting rarely getting pushed to its limits well, but you certainly won’t be going through Hell just to see its moments of interest.