Fortunately, the game is almost always enjoyable and engaging enough to distract me from its subject matter. Of course, the moment I stop and thinking about what I'm doing, it's pretty bleak and horrible, and the effect is of course compounded by the current real-life pandemic. It's quite calming, in what is probably a very twisted way. I adore the sinister, dreadful atmosphere of the game, from the darkly organic soundtrack to the ominous spread of red across the planet. Evolved not as a strategy game, but as an experience.

I think it might just be that I play Plague Inc. I'm sure reasons do exist, but I have no interest in finding them. And I've no idea what I do differently each time which results in a win or a loss. Generally, I win about half the time, and lose the other half. Incidentally: fuck you, Greenland, with your one port that you close the instant anyone so much as sneezes in Australia.īut anyway, there's a startling depth to Plague Inc, and to this day I don't understand why I've never felt any desire to look up different tips or strategies to see how I can do things better. And if a country gets too jumpy about the potential severity of your plague, then they'll close off their ports, stopping you from infecting them. Countries that border one another are obviously vulnerable to transmission of the disease, but other countries are islands that can only be reached via plane or ship. Too late, and the humans will likely develop a cure before you have time to reach your goal of total genocide.Īnother thing to think about is that there are various different manners of spreading each disease. Too early and you risk wiping out all your hosts, preventing further transmission. This change has to come at just the right moment, though. You'll generally want to maximise your creation's infectiousness first, before suddenly cranking up the lethality once you've passed the point of no return. In most cases, evolving your disease is a delicate balancing act. There's a surprising amount of complexity in the systems of Plague Inc.

And, strangely, it's just about the only strategy game I routinely play where I haven't the slightest desire to get any better at it. It's a fairly challenging little strategy game that can be played out in the span of perhaps 10 minutes. Billions of human beings are boiled down to numbers of healthy, infected, and dead, allowing players to neatly sidestep the potential well of moral turmoil that such subject matter invites (especially in these times), and instead focus on evolving their plague. Plague Inc: Evolved is a game about killing off the human race with a disease. One a day, every day, perhaps for all time. Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives.

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