Review: Poison Control Plunges Players Into a Sea of Action RPG Mediocrity

Poison Control rarely goes beyond the cheap laughs to be had from its story.

Poison Control
Photo: Nippon Ichi Software

“Hell is other people,” Sartre once wrote, but Poison Control seems determined to prove him wrong. As you traverse the five circles of the Hell Realm, you’ll meet and recruit others by purging them of their delusions. The stories that dot each hell aren’t very deep, but they’re at least varied, from a would-be gardener who uses her mother’s blood as fertilizer to a woman who sacrifices others in an attempt to resurrect her beloved dog. By comparison, the design of each hell—an unimaginative mix of long, bland corridors and wide arenas—is one-note, and the creaky, repetitive third-person shooting mechanics do nothing to alleviate the deadening weight of wandering reskinned versions of the same map and having to kill the same few enemy types over and over again.

Nippon Ichi Software’s new action RPG suffers from a surfeit of anime tropes, desperately hoping that its dependence on zany antics, overly familiar characters, recycled animations, and cultural appropriations will make up for its lack of substance. Poison Control draws names from Buddhism, for instance, for the sake of their religious cachet and thin association to the game’s afterlife theme but stops short of saying anything about spiritual belief.

Poison Control rarely goes beyond the cheap laughs to be had from its story. It’s in everything from the dehumanizing way in which levels are referred to as Belles’ Hells to how the soul-bond between you and the amnesiac Poisonette is just the setup for a series of sex jokes (the first thing Poisonette says after hijacking your body is “What’s with this humongous rack?”). The game even blatantly manipulates players into choosing the most salacious dialogue options by tying them to better stat boosts, like Toxicity (damage) and Synergy (hit points).

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That said, at least the game’s ribald tone exudes a sense of purpose. By contrast, the reductive design of each level makes each one feel more like a generic limbo than a personalized hell made manifest by a tormented soul. In stark contrast to Persona 5, whose dungeons provide psychoanalytical insight into the perversions of its respective ruler, Poison Control’s only give us a superficial impression of the misery that led to the creation of a Belle’s hell. One Belle is obsessed with money so the level is, of course, filled with gilded statues of currency symbols. The drowned figure-skater’s hellscape introduces submerged demons, and the allergist’s nightmare realm features floating pollen-like monsters. These slight ties between character and setting do nothing in the end to invest us in saving any of these Belles, and this goes double for your main rival, a Woman in Mourning who, until the last few levels, is defined entirely by malapropisms like “no-breast prestige” for “noblesse oblige.”

It might have been easier to overlook these problems if purging the game’s hells were enjoyable. For the most part, combat is a bog-standard shootathon, with the protagonist equipping liberated souls as Toxicants (weapons), Antidotes (armor), and Catalysts (bonus stats). The gimmick of being able to lend your flesh to the unarmed Poisonette, projecting her a short distance from your skeletal remains so that she can absorb the various toxic mires on each map, adds a wrinkle to the shooting, but not only does this become a mindless chore after a while, it’s also poorly executed. Swapping from your hero to Poisonette is as sluggish as performing an unreliable dodge roll, and both actions will leave you much too vulnerable to attacks. It tends to be more efficient to just stand one’s ground, moving only while waiting for a Toxicant to reload or in an attempt to regain health by absorbing poison.

This demon-shooting, poison-absorbing shtick isn’t nearly compelling enough to make you want to move to the next dungeon, so when difficulty spikes urge you to replay completed levels to power up your gear, it’s morale-crushing. It doesn’t help that there are over 25 Belles’ Hells to be purged in the game and not a single one is memorable in its design. In fact, the more of them you clear, the more they start to blur into one another. Worse, you encounter the same six or so enemies over and over again, never gain any new abilities, and there are essentially only four types of weapons. You’ll never be moved to tears by a Belle’s trite sob story, but you may cry at the prospect of having to sit through that same story multiple times. Poison Control is hell, all right, but not the one the developers intended.

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The game was reviewed using a code provided by NIS America, Inc.

Score: 
 Developer: Nippon Ichi Software  Publisher: Nippon Ichi Software  Platform: PlayStation 5  Release Date: April 13, 2021  ESRB: T  ESRB Descriptions: Blood and Gore, Fantasy Violence, Language, Suggestive Themes  Buy: Game

Aaron Riccio

Aaron has been playing games since the late ’80s and writing about them since the early ’00s. He also obsessively writes about crossword clues at The Crossword Scholar.

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