![]() ![]() ![]() To win at Plague Inc: Evolved is to embrace non-human objectivity, at which point the humour of the newsreel turns from cynical to absurd. Humans are silly, self-involved, and ignorant of a world that easily could (and soon will) exist without them. But I eventually realized that nothing I do matters. Initially it rubbed me the wrong way, with subjects that felt unfunny and often in poor taste. The closest a player gets to humanity is a news ticker that parodies culture in a snarky manner. At most, humanity is an obstacle that needs to be avoided lest it become focused on a cure. On the evolution screen I can see the physical structure of Mr. On the world map I can see places I know. Plague Inc: Evolved takes place above me and inside of me, but I have no name in it. I start to wonder about that cough (maybe it’s more than asthma?) and continue to watch the world die through my clicks. But if extinction is riding a microbial Trojan horse, I almost certainly will have already contracted it by the time we discover the plague. A severe microbe like Ebola stands no chance of human eradication based on this model (which the CDC has endorsed as incredibly realistic). lures you in because it presents a problem to be solved, and the strategy is strangely comforting to me as a player. After that a few clicks in the evolution screen would decimate the population with organ failure and hemorrhagic shock before anyone realized they should be working on a cure. Shoeshine silently infected more people until the game informed me that there were no more healthy people on planet Earth. With that in mind, I kept from evolving as much as a cough while Mr. Shoeshine to catch, it became abundantly clear that the most efficient way to engineer a pathogenic apocalypse would be to ensure it remains hidden for as long as possible. The plague that will eradicate humanity will be symptomless at first. Here’s my five-stage journey from deity to non-entity, a descent in which I erased myself and came face to face with the magnificent void. Shoeshine, my first apocalyptic bacteria, darkened the world with pestilence and death, I instead become the willing agent of my own demise and I enjoyed every morbid moment of the process. When I played through the game for the first time it was in pursuit of that familiar sense of God-like grandeur. It’s the ultimate God mode, in the Biblical sense of the term. You accrue DNA points as more people are infected, allowing you to purchase new traits to help the disease transmit between hosts, resist medicine, and kill the infected. You choose a pathogen, add a few helpful modifications, infect patient zero, and then watch as the red dots that represent the spread of your disease slowly multiply across the map. As a strategy game, it’s pretty straightforward. Plague Inc: Evolved, the sequel to a mobile title by Ndemic Creations, is a plague simulator currently available on Steam Early Access. ![]()
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