Obviously, this year has been defined by the outbreak of a deadly disease which keeps many of us quarantined and many more terrified that we're going to kill our loved ones by going to work and contracting something that'll spread to them.
So what better way to deal with our fears than by facing them head on, playing as a contagion aiming to eliminate the human population. That's right: We're playing Plague Inc.: Evolved.
The most clever aspect to this game is that it's less of a game of more of a system that players can work in and play with. At the end of day, Plague Inc is a simulation of what might happen in the world today if a disease was spread under specific, player driven criteria. The goal, of course, being to manipulate that criteria to create a scenario where the pathogen they have built managed to infect and kill every living person on the planet.
But just because the simulation was designed purely to model real-life diseases, does not mean that it can't be engineered to perform other, similar experiments. There's a strong modding community building their own custom scenarios with it's toolkit, and way back in the college days I remember using them to blow off steam. In particular, I was fond of the alien symbiote-related scenarios, creating situations where everyone on Earth was bonded to and merged with an alien creature.
I'm also impressed with how much love the game still receives from the development team. Some of what we experienced, like the Fake News scenario, had to have been recently brought into the game. Not to mention some of the random situations that are ripped straight from the headlines: The Olympic outbreak comes to mind.
It's simple to understand, even if the algorithms at work may not be, but that simplicity allows for it to be built upon in ways that one wouldn't necessarily see coming.
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