Poison
Control by developer Nippon Ichi Software and publisher NIS America Inc.—Sony Playstation 4 review written by Richard
with a copy provided by the publisher.Estimated reading time: 7 minutes
Have you ever felt mired in doubt or
delusion? Have your worries and fears ever felt like poison gnawing away at
your soul? Well find out how a soul gets cleansed of this murk, as you delve
into Hell in Poison Control in order to cleanse the mind, and spirit.
In this new release title from NIS, we
are introduced to a nameless main character, who gets predated upon by a horned
demon called a Klesha. The Klesha, however, bonds with the main character,
allowing the Klesha to regain its sanity and inhabit the body of the main
character, leaving nothing but a skeleton behind. This doesn't mean the end for
the main character though, as they are now sharing the body with the Klesha
turned “poison girl”, who our MC has taken to calling “Poisonette”.
Turns out that these Klesha are the
results of delusions and negative emotions brought about by girls who have
fallen into Hell, whether they have actually died or are just “slated” for Hell
upon death in their current state. You and Poisonette must go and cleanse the
poison mires created from these girls negative emotions in order to let them
rest in peace. You aren't exactly being altruistic here though, as cleansing a
girls soul will reward you with a sticker. Collect enough and you are allowed
into Heaven along with a single wish.
So how does one go about purifying the
poison mires of one's heart? With a Megaman style arm blaster of course! After
bonding with Poisonette, the MC gets an arm blaster, which you can outfit with
different shot types. Couple this with Poisonette's ability to cleanse the
mires by walking over them, and you have a recipe for success! Cleansing a soul
is pretty basic in principle: you select a soul, roam around an area shooting
enemies and cleansing poison, and then either talk to the soul or collect a
“soul remnant” or item that is intricately associated with what caused the
poison to take root, and there you go.
All this is done in a 3D third person
view action style, where you run and gun. While shooting, you have a number of
different shot types, such as laser, bomb, or rapid. You only have a set number
of bullets, but depleting your ammo causes the bullets to slowly refill. You
also have a dodge roll that will give you a period of invincibility and a
powerful area shock move that requires charging by purifying the mires. If you
run out of health while trying to cleanse a soul, there is a gauge in the
bottom right with butterflies in it. Each butterfly will revive you upon death,
and can be refilled by purifying a bunch of poison.
During purify mode, you send Poisonette
out to clean up the poison. This is performed by walking over it. If you
complete a loop, anything within the area you walked around will also be
purified, including doing damage to enemies if they are caught within. Be
careful though, as Poisonette can take damage, and so can your skeleton while
Poisonette is out. Additionally, there's a time limit on how long Poisonette
can remain out, and the closer to the time limit you get, the slower she moves.
Sometimes it's better to just make a straight path, and sometimes it's better
to enclose an area.
While trying to purify a soul, you may
come across a number of gold chests. These chests either contain the key item
related to the poison behind the soul, or are one of three tokens per soul. If
you collect all three tokens in a soul area, you gain that soul to use as a
Toxicant, Antidote, or Catalyst, depending on the soul. These are basically
just equipables, where the Toxicants are your weapons/shot types, Antidotes and
Catalysts provide different support effects. There is also another type of
equipable, Deliriants, which are picked up in stages. The other equipable souls
can be upgraded in exchange for money, but Deliriants are limited ammo weapons
that you can't upgrade.
Occasionally during or after a stage you
will have a chance to chat with Poisonette, and you are allowed to make a
choice in response. These choices will affect a stat, namely something like
“Toxicity”, “Empathy”, or “Trust”. Each of these stats will affect a parameter,
such as shot recharge speed, or damage dealt. You can't max all of them out
during a single playthrough, so choose wisely. You can return to stages to get
more cash however, so at least that isn't too worrisome, although the response
you give for the repeated in-area conversation won't affect your stats.
I'll be perfectly honest when I say that
Poison Control is rather simple, and the stages do start to get a little
repetitive after a while. That being said, each soul has their own uniques
personality and circumstance, making it interesting to learn about them. Some
souls are older, some are younger. Some souls have been burning their bad
homework marks and it may start to escalate, some souls murder people because
they can. Not everyone is redeemable, but that isn't your job, you just need to
purify the poison.
The areas themselves have a decent amount
of variety, but tend to be really large with tons of blocked off areas. It
would have been a lot better to just not have the section that are blocked off
actually existing. Enemies are usually reasonable once you figure out how they
function, but some of the late game enemies can get really annoying. Also, your
shots have a sort of critical distance that you want to be in, otherwise you'll
either be to close to hit where you're aiming, or too far away and your shot falls
off. There's also a timer while you're in a stage, which is your time limit
before getting a “Game Over”, but it gives you so much time I don't believe I
ever had it go below half.
The visuals are kind of cute, but nothing
to get too excited about, but are quite colourful, especially the different
coloured mires with different damage rates. The character interactions are
where it's really at though, as you really get a sense of personality out of
the souls you interact with in Hell. As a whole, the game isn't too long, which
is good since there isn't really a great deal of enemy variety or boss variety,
and is pretty much the same steps every soul you go to cleanse.
The game runs pretty smoothly for the
most part, although there were the occasional blank text boxes, missing
dialogue, or dead enemies that don't disappear for some reason. On the plus
side, the localization team did a stellar job translating this title. There
were a bunch of phrases I heard during the dialogue that are usually poorly translated
due to English not having an equivalent phrase, but the localization team
managed to nail down really well. I also really liked the “Higan Radio”, which
acts as an introduction to each stage, and will generally give a brief
description of the soul that has made its way into Hell.
Summary
Overall, I had quite a lot of fun with
Poison Control. The ARPG aspect was pretty fun, the characters were
interesting, and the poison cleansing was actually fun to balance against
attacking enemies. While Poison Control does get a little repetitive after awhile,
but thanks to the smaller instance size for cleansing the souls, it is fairly
easy to pick up for a mission or two, and then put down for a bit.
The writing was well done, and the
localization team did a really good job translating, which is also nice to see.
Poison Control definitely won't be for everybody, but that doesn't mean it's
specifically niche in its gameplay either. If you're okay with the anime
stylized art style and an abundance of female characters, I'd say take a look
at Poison Control to see if it interests you.
Score: 7.5 / 10
