While family-friendly and action-oriented fare may be the lifeblood of the Switch in many ways, there’s obviously room for content moving in an entirely different direction. While most people think of first-person shooters, bloody fighters, or some sort of horror-oriented survival fare when you talk about M-rated games, there are also ones that run off in their own oddball directions. The Kindeman Remedy falls into that camp, with a pretty morbid take on a management sim, playing as a doctor and nurse who are flagrantly ignoring the Hippocratic oath to “Do no harm”.

Playing as a disgraced doctor, now working with a prison, you see an opportunity to advance your career once again while using whatever means necessary. With the help of Sister Anna you’ll be able to poison inmates, using their dead bodies for raw materials you’ll extract for more complex purposes like saving them from the electric chair, just so you’ll be able to use them as a guinea pig for your experiments. Of course, you’ll need to be careful not to show your hand, being sure not to do too much at once or get caught, and ultimately how you conduct yourself and what you pursue will dictate a small variety of endings.

Conceptually this all plays out like a variation of the musical Sweeney Todd, though with some details altered to make it distinctive. If you’re willing to be patient, this can bear some narrative fruit, but compared to some other similar titles in the eShop I’ve played, this seems to take its time. Perhaps the issue is one of pacing, with it feeling like the game keeps your training wheels in place a little too long or opening up more elements too slowly. But for people familiar with time management sims this will probably feel underwhelming for a while, simply not asking you to stretch yourself thin enough soon enough. Complicating matters is that the controls as the means of executing your vision are also not quite up to par, making you prone to unnecessary mistakes or delays at times, furthering frustration.

Perhaps if this were the only game in town for this sort of thrill it would demand a better score, but even with some of the flaws Ravenous Devils had as one example of a competitor it still felt more successful. It isn’t quite enough to just be dark and a bit shocking, the gameplay really needs to have a flow to it so even as it can be repetitive you still feel locked into what you’re doing. Here, the controls not being quite ideal gets in the way primarily, eclipsing the concerns with pacing as the game’s primary obstacle. There’s something to enjoy here if you’re patient, but the gameplay isn’t where it needs to be to make the experience more memorable.