You know the drill by now. I’m playing through all the games by my favorite indie studio Inutoneko, and I finally reached Picot Ether. First released in 2022, Picot Ether is a COVID-19 R-BOW virus treatment simulation game where you play Yumelusia, a medical doctor and researcher who tries to find a cure for the R-BOW virus plaguing the city of Ishwald.

Just like the virus it was based on, R-BOW virus mutates into various strains, starting from alpha (α) all the way to omega (ω). You don’t so much treat it as manage the symptoms until enough people have developed a resistance to that strain and the number of infected people drop. Then a new strain emerges and you have to figure out what the symptoms are and develop drugs to manage those ones as well.

Here’s what the main screen looks like:

The important things are in the middle. The blue box with squares is your hospital with its patients. The progress bars under them show how close they are to being cured. Not all of them have the current R-BOW virus strain: others are just there to buy whatever medicine you have on sale. If you take too long to treat patients or don’t have any medicine for them, they’ll get angry and leave, but not before demanding hefty amounts of compensation and consuming a lot of your energy.

Therefore you have to manage the three bars labeled Life, Material and Medicine. Life means you have enough energy to deal with patients, material is the ingredients you use to formulate medicine, and medicine is your stocks of whatever drug you’re currently selling. That’s the three bottles below, so you can see exactly what you’ve got.

The last row in the middle shows Yumelusia’s Command Skills. Skills that refill over time and do things like refilling your Life, increasing the efficiency of medicines, treating patients without medicine (best skill ever) and even kicking out unruly patients.

Here’s the list of various symptoms:

I forget what they are, but they include things like fever, body pain and poor appetite. So the game goes like this: you’re introduced to a strain and you have to research it to see what it does, then either develop drugs to treat the symptoms or start selling the ones you already have that address those particular complaints. The latters like C, D, S and Z show how powerful the drug is at addressing that symptom. Later strains demand quite a bit of you. Oh, and more than one strain can be common at the same time, though there will always be a main one.

To get materials, money, new recipes and new command skills, you need to go adventuring. I’m assuming you send your usual adventuring crew on your behalf. The adventuring screen looks like this:

There are no battles or enemies. As long as you have enough medals, you can get anything and everything you want in that run. And you can leave at any time and go back to the clinic, putting things on hold if, for example, you don’t have enough medals. One of the most stress-free adventuring modes in an Inutoneko game. I’m assuming Yumelusia is too busy to actually rummage through the woods herself, so most of the work will be done by the usual Ishwald crew:

I wish I could tell you what’s going on with any of them, but I have no idea because I stopped reading the optional side stories long ago. It takes too long for the status quo to change in these games, so I lost interest. The only thing I picked up is that Rakumo from Rakunou Princess is managing a dairy-themed idol group now, which is both very like her and very unexpected.

Since Picot Ether is a simulation game, it involves saving and earning rewards like money, magic stones and medals to get stronger. You start with a tiny clinic, very few savings, a small material bag and so on, and then by the end you’re making millions of pounds and earning hundreds of magic stones every month. It’s very satisfying once you figure out the gameplay, get the right medicines to make your customers happy and increase your Life, Materials and Medicine stocks so you aren’t easily running out of all of them.

Easier said than done, though. Midway through, the game can get very difficult. Later strains require more expensive medicines, which cost more money to make. Plus stocking more expensive medicines makes your clinic more busy. You’ll be rushed off your feet in no time, and then patients will get angry at the slow service and ragequit your clinic, taking your money with it. It’s very easy to end up broken in such seasons, and there was a time when I was spending money on upgrades as soon as I made it, just to keep it from going to patients as compensation money.

Furthermore, although Picot Ether gives the impression that if a strain has three symptoms you can administer three drugs to address them, actually Yumelusia will complain endlessly if you do this (IDK why, the patients are still getting cured, right?) so you’re supposed to sell enough of a drug to unlock slots that can change or upgrade what they do. For example to give a fever-reducing medication the ability to stimulate the appetite. Or to change an effect from A to S, or S to Z. That kind of thing.

Look at this screenshot for the xi (ξ) strain, for example:

All the symptoms are being more than addressed, but Yumelusia doesn’t like it. She wants one drug to do everything. A visual bug? I think so. I ignored her and forced my way through with these drugs and the healing skill and the xi strain passed eventually. But compare it to the omega strain where I had one drug (the bottom one) doing all the work:

And she’s finally happy. The game ends properly when you deal with omega and life returns to (relative) normalcy in Ishwald. And everyone is happy except me because the instructions were unclear and caused a lot of frustration. Also the game wasn’t that great.

Good parts about Picot Ether

💊Getting rich, especially the late game when the money poured in almost faster than I could spend it. It almost made the early hard work feel worth it.

💊No matter how much you mess up, you don’t get a game over. You can lower your store’s rating, switch to cheaper medicines and build up your strength before tackling the stronger strains again.

💊No time limit or seasons either, just an endless loop of drugs and sickness.

💊Lots of different pictures for the drugs. I remember back in the day when inutoneko used the same icons for everything; they’ve really come a long way!

Not so great stuff

💉Unclear instructions and requirements were frustrating. Yumelucia just complains when things are wrong but offers no hints or assistance.

💉The gameplay loop is dull and lacks surprises. Find recipe, make recipe, sell recipe, repeat.

💉Adventuring was too easy.

💉It’s a game about researching and developing drugs, but actually you just pick new recipes up in dungeons. Even the tweaking part requires selling lots of each drug, nothing intellectual at all.

💉It’s a game about making drugs, but every drug uses the same vague “ingredients.” I’m not expecting a deep Atelier series type of experience, but I’ve played lots of games from this developer to know they can do better. For example, they can have categories, like “active ingredients,” “solvents,” “flavorings,” “preservatives,” etc. that you combine in different proportions to make the drugs. Or you can have tools, or special facilities. Or a skill tree. Use a little imagination!

Tips for success

Picot Ether was underwhelming for me. I played it, I finished it, I more or less liked it, but it’s not great and I’m not clamoring for me. Most likely the other fans felt the same because there are precious few resources on the game unlike other inutoneko titles. In the off chance that others play it, or that it gets localized someday, here are a few simple tips to reduce the frustration.

1. Focus more on unlocking friends that make the main game easier, rather than those that make adventuring easier. One adventuring buddy is enough for early one. Friends that increase cash and medal drop rates are the best to have.

2. Absolutely do not expand the clinic too soon. Expanding it before you can store enough materials and make enough medicine to satisfy more clients is suicide.

3. I don’t know if which command skills you get are random or not. Either way, try and get the one that cures patients even if you don’t have medicine ASAP, as well as the one that refills life. Just those two alone will carry you quite some way into the game.

4. Don’t be afraid to roll back your clinic’s level and sell cheaper medicines if the stronger strains are kicking your ass. Nobody will die just because you failed to treat them.

5. Don’t ignore adventuring: try to upgrade to deeper levels as soon as you can afford it because that’s where the better recipes lie.

6. Don’t rush through each dungeon floor: collect all the magic stones first. And don’t use magic stones in place of medals: back out and save more medals and then return. You also don’t have to make it all the way to the end every time, you can leave when you’ve had enough.

7. There’s a gimmick where a drug gets harder to craft the more you sell it. You have to pull drugs regularly from the store and let them “rest” for a while to recharge. But you can use magic stones to stop this decline from happening. Do not do this for every drug! It’s too expensive! Do it only for the best ones to fight particular strains, or for those that counter lots of symptoms and that you’ll be using for a long time.

8. You can brute-force the whole game using the command skills I mentioned in tip 3. Just FYI in case Yumelucia is stressing you out too much and you can’t quite get the combination of drugs right for the harder strains.

9. Play around with drug slots a lot. It wasn’t very well-explained at first, but once I started adding attributes like “give me more life,” “cost less material to produce” and “reduce the number of patients” to my drugs, it made the game go by a lot faster. The omega strain in particular will linger forever unless you add lots of “reduce patients” attributes to your main drugs.

What else I’m playing lately

Immortal Life is semi-dropped while I explore other options. Now that I’m done with Picot Ether, I’m looking to either restart Atelier Marie Remake or start Slay the Spire. For gacha games I’m playing Chaos Zero Nightmare, but few of the problems I had with it last year have been solved. I hear there’s a big update coming up next week so I’m sticking it out till then before quitting. CZN is not for me, but card-based videogames themselves seem very promising. …I feel like I said the same thing last year. My backlog is just too darned long, that’s the problem. *sigh*