Pick Your Poison Review (PC)

It feels as if I’m shaking hands with the devil — like I’m willingly signing my own death certificate without acknowledging the terms and conditions. I think, perhaps, that there is a fine print here somewhere—a written alternative for the fumigated conundrum that I’ve recently found myself in. But between eight shots of questionable liquor and something of a speakeasy slur, I’m struggling to decipher exactly what that is. Yet, even among these troubled circumstances and a morbid atmosphere, there is one thing that remains as clear as any other diluted reality on the top shelf: if I mistakingly consume the incorrect toxin, then I’ll immediately bypass the hangover and wind up in another, slightly more depressing state. “Pick Your Poison,” the bartender demands. But to be honest, I’m not sure I want to, for I know that these concoctions are thrice as troubling as a double absinthe, no rocks.

I have a second “shot” at life—another chance to rewrite my wrongs and parade the flag for a future that’s more economically viable. But, as with any light at the end of the tunnel, there is, regrettably, still a tunnel. And it’s that tunnel that keeps you; it’s that painfully long slog that it makes you walk, that fools you into believing that salvation is but a stone’s throw away. But in reality, it’s a shot in the dark—an eternity from your grasp.

In Pick Your Poison, that aforementioned tunnel is stitched into the two-dimensional composition of a bartender’s slimy deal—an exchange that propositions the price of vigor and mortality, and the lengths one would travel to claim them. But the deal here isn’t anything more than a simple agreement—a game, if you will, that orbits the outer boroughs of traditional roulette.

A Shot in the Dark

The mood is hollow, and the air is thick. The lights are dim and the ambiance is anything other than warm and welcoming. There’s a bartender, a depressingly long line of murky alcoholic beverages, and a select few tipples that harbor a deadly poison. The situation is dire, and all cards are well and truly off the table. The only thing that matters here is that you don’t choose the wrong drink. Like roulette, I suppose, it’s all or nothing. There are rarely any winners — only losers, and those who consciously choose to pour their last-remaining assets into a game of chance. And as luck would have it, that game of chance is your only hope. Go figure.

To put you in the picture, Pick Your Poison is a short fifteen-minute turn-based roulette game, one in which you, the receiver of the short end of the stick, are given the monumental ultimatum of either subjecting yourself to a simple, albeit potentially fatal game of chance, or turning a blind eye to a mental decline. As the latter is almost immediately off the table, the only option you have available to you is to, well, pick your poison, so to speak. And that’s where things get a little, shall we say, tricky. But more on that shortly.

A Quick Tipple Before Death

It begins with a choice—an option to choose one of several drinks on the bar. A turn-based game at heart, Pick Your Poison then gives you opportunity to turn the tide on your opponent—a bartender who, rather mysteriously, offers you the chance to douse your own drinks with a lethal toxin. The idea from there is a simple one: take turns consuming an elixir, until all lives have been exhausted, and the last-remaining shot illuminates the victor. But, there’s a little more to it than that. Suffice it to say, if it was just the case of mindlessly selecting beverages on a bar until an anticlimactic event occurred, then it wouldn’t be much of a game, to begin with. Yet there’s a catch here: with each passing turn you take, each player has an opportunity to deploy a “special” tactic.

While the gameplay itself is heavily reliant upon the basic rules of roulette, Pick Your Poison does make an effort to spice up its elixir with a few extra ingredients. For example, players can utilize certain “items” during the round—wild cards, if you will, that can swivel the tide of the battle and allow either player the chance to get a leg up on their opponent, either with items that can remove the odds of succumbing to infection, or provide the ability to look beyond the tipple to identity any potential threat. And it’s these wild cards that elevate what is otherwise a rather generic form of roulette—to the point where each round feels original and invigoratingly different from the last.

Verdict

Pick Your Poison is an easy-to-stomach tipple of a roulette game that will no doubt appeal to your taste buds and keep you coming back for a second round. At its heart, it’s a quick-witted, often intensifying experience that, while not brimming with the luscious flavors of a full-fledged storyline or a cocktail of visual effects of a particularly striking note, possesses a lot of surprisingly quality flavors. As for whether or not it packs enough of a punch in its short fifteen-minute campaign is another matter. That said, given the simple gameplay formula that it adopts, it’s difficult to imagine how it would broaden its scope, narratively speaking. Even still, if it were readily available, then I wouldn’t turn down the opportunity to sink another float of well-oiled toxins.

To give you a gentle nudge in the right direction, I’ll leave you with this: if the usual trappings of a gun-based roulette game are beginning to taste a little, I don’t know, bitter, then perhaps you ought to try your luck at another, slightly more liquefied alternative. It’s still the same basic concept, but with a generous amount of flavors there to shake up the recipe every once in a blue moon, you could certainly spend a fair while slamming shots at the bar in the underbelly of this speakeasy hellhole.