A Game a Week #1: Plague Inc
I’ve never played Plague Inc. before, which feels slightly ridiculous given how long it’s been around. I’ve also decided to start playing more games that have passed me by (or that wouldn't usually interest me) partly to expand my own library and partly to see how other games solve problems I might run into myself.
My first impression is that Plague Inc. is essentially a spreadsheet with a very thin layer of plague-themed presentation over the top. Most of what you’re doing is changing numbers and watching those numbers have visual consequences on the map.
And honestly, that’s not really my kind of game. But I think Plague Inc. does a surprisingly good job of making that spreadsheet feel like a game.
A big part of that is the little bits of flavour surrounding the actual strategy. The news ticker in the corner is a great example. Most of it is completely unnecessary to understanding or playing the game, but it gives you these little moments of personality. Sometimes the news is relevant to your disease, sometimes it’s just a funny bit of flavour text, but either way it makes me smile and gives the world a bit more life.
The same goes for watching planes and ships move around the map. Obviously they communicate how your disease is spreading, but they could have represented that in a much more abstract way. Seeing an actual plane fly from one country to another makes the whole thing feel more tangible.
I did find myself wishing there was a little more of this. If you’ve invested in transmission through birds, for example, it would be cool to actually see birds moving around the map and spreading the disease. I can understand why they didn’t do this, though. You’d quickly end up with a ridiculous amount of visual noise.
The bubbles you click for extra DNA points are another small but clever addition. I’m playing on Steam Deck, and without them I think I’d spend a lot more time staring at the screen waiting for things to happen. Having something occasionally appear that requires me to actually interact with the game keeps me looking at it.
It’s a very small amount of active engagement, but I think it makes a big difference. I’m watching the map, reading the news, popping bubbles and checking where the disease is spreading. None of it is particularly complicated, and the game pauses for important events, so it never becomes overwhelming. For a game that’s essentially about watching numbers change, that’s a pretty elegant solution.
Where I’ve struggled is actually understanding how I’m supposed to win.
The game gives you three broad areas to invest in: transmission, symptoms and abilities. In theory, there’s an interesting balance between spreading the disease, keeping it under the radar and eventually making it deadly. In practice, I’ve found myself constantly committing too heavily to one approach and then struggling to recover.
I’ll start thinking, Right, I’m going to focus on infecting poorer countries and spread this thing everywhere, only to eventually find myself completely stuck trying to infect wealthy or colder countries. Penetrating and wiping out Canada, in particular, seems to be a personal weakpoint of mine. Then I’ll try focusing more on resistance or severity, and suddenly I’ve created a completely different problem.
I think part of this is probably me not understanding the game well enough yet. I’ve only really been messing around with the basic bacteria type, and I suspect there are much more deliberate strategies to learn. The skill tree itself is actually pretty interesting. It’s simple, but I like the way some upgrades act as prerequisites for others, while certain more powerful upgrades require you to unlock things across different branches.
It makes me wonder how much the game expects me to actually plan ahead rather than just react to what’s happening. At the moment, I’m enjoying the latter. I like looking at what’s happening and adapting my disease around it. If a particular country is proving difficult, I’ll try something different. If the cure is becoming a problem, I’ll react to that.
Maybe that’s why I’m struggling.
The game might simply be asking me to think several steps ahead, whereas I’m treating it more like an experiment. Interestingly, I think some of the randomness makes this more complicated. I’ve had situations where useful events happen before the cure has even really become a problem, which feels a little frustrating because the game is effectively solving a problem I haven’t encountered yet. At the same time, I’ve also had random symptoms evolve without me paying for them, which can completely change the situation, positively or negatively, depending on the symptom and your strategy. I suspect there’s a really interesting balance between strategy and randomness here that I haven’t quite figured out yet.
The biggest frustration came at the end of one of my games. I’d managed to infect pretty much the entire world and had killed almost everyone. I watched the infected population steadily fall until eventually the last infected person died.
Then I lost.
Apparently some healthy people had survived. The problem wasn’t necessarily that I’d lost. What annoyed me was that I couldn’t properly understand why I’d lost. Once the game ended, I couldn’t go back and inspect the map to see where those survivors were. I couldn’t look at the countries and figure out what I’d missed. I just got told that I’d been defeated and had to move on. For a game that’s built around learning, adapting and trying again, that felt like a missed opportunity. I don’t need the game to tell me exactly what strategy to use, but I do want enough information to understand my mistake. If I lose because 0.1% of the population survived in some obscure corner of the world, show me where they were. Let me investigate the failure so I can make a better decision next time. That’s probably my biggest takeaway from playing Plague Inc. so far.
I’m enjoying how much presentation it layers onto what is fundamentally a fairly abstract numbers game. The news, the planes, the ships, the map and even the little bubbles all do just enough to keep me engaged without overwhelming the actual strategy.
But when the game finally beats me, I want to understand why.
Maybe I’ll get better at it and this particular problem will disappear. Maybe I’ll learn the optimal strategies and realise I was just playing badly.
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