Plague Inc. / YMMV

Alternative Character Interpretation: With some diseases, you have to wonder: is everything you make naturally occurring? Or was it engineered? Some players have a headcanon in which the various pathogens were created by a country as a form of population control Gone Horribly Right.
Awesome Music:
- The Neurax Worm and Adverse Reactions.
- The Simian Flu gets a really cool piano tune, which fits in the context of its source film.
- The Shadow Plague theme, which is mostly orchestrated, features dark-sounding piano music, Ominous Latin Chanting, and an organ riff, and sounds just perfect for a scenario revolving around vampires.
- "Flatten The Curve", the theme for playing Cure Mode in Evolved. It fits incredibly well as an opposing theme, with a mix of heroic solemnity and frantic desperation that emphasizes your struggle to contain and cure The Plague before it's too late.
Breather Level: The "Santa's Little Helper" scenario is the easiest to beat among the scenarios that force you into a certain plague type (and maybe even among those that don't), due to the type in question being the Neurax Worm (see Game-Breaker below). On top of the normal perks like Trojan Planes, you don't need to evolve a special symptom to get an instant win when everyone's infected, some symptoms open ports and make them stay open, others decrease the cure, and most of what's left increases infectivity.
Complacent Gaming Syndrome:
- Many players tend to prefer playing as the Neurax Worm or Necroa Virus in the normal game and Scenarios that allow them to pick a pathogen, as they're usually seen as the most interesting (and effective in the former's case; see Game-Breaker below). Most of the other plagues are viewed more as Boring, but Practical, while not having the pronounced difficulty of the Simian Flu or Shadow Plague.
- A lot of players have a starting country that they swear by.
  - Tired of infecting everywhere except Greenland? Start there. Problem solved.
  - A good second pick is Russia - plenty of people to infect before it becomes noticeable gives some useful cold resistance, and it has one of the few ports that reliably visit Greenland.
  - China is also a really good pick - access to a seaport and an airport, home to 1/7 of the world's population, and it shares a border with Russia.
  - India is also common for similar reasons, having a high population pool that beats China, trading "Borders Russia" for "Disease starts with some heat resistance".
  - Saudi Arabia is another popular choice for the heat resistance and having an airport that visits a lot of other countries, as well as a seaport that visits some good places, including the other major headache island, Madagascar.
- Similar to countries, plenty of players swear by one set of genetic traits at the beginning of the game.
  - One of the most commonly chosen genes before beginning the game is Aquacyte, which increases the chance of your plague spreading by sea. Helpful for getting those pesky island countries.
  - Another common one is Genetic Mimic, which flat-out makes the plague harder to cure. Good for Mega-Brutal strategies where every second you can delay the cure counts.
  - The genes to keep costs from increasing (Sympto, Patho, and Trans-Stasis) are often favored. Sympto-Stasis is often preferred since there's a ton of symptoms to choose from and is needed to infect and kill people. Combining these genes with the aforementioned Genetic Mimic helps to counter the drawback of making the plague easier to cure.
  - Catalytic Switch is another good one for Mega-Brutal; it makes it so you get DNA from popping blue cure bubbles, which is a good way to get DNA in the late-game and keep you from running out of gas.
  - Extremophile gets you a minor bonus in every environment type (arid, humid, rural, urban), which some players believe is better than a major bonus in only one like the other environment genes give you.
- With the exception of a few plague types, the typical strategy players follow is spreading the disease with no symptoms so no one notices it, then when the entire planet is infected, flip the kill switch. This is probably why there have been updates to the game that gave all diseases some severity by default so as to prevent this from happening, with Mega-Brutal making it flat-out impossible to do.
- The Water, Air, and Extreme Bioaerosol transmissions are pretty much the only ones anyone ever evolves barring strange situations or plagues that don't really have them, partly because they boost international transmission (land border transmission more or less happens on its own), the Blood transmissions aren't worth it, and the Zoonotic set is too expensive.
- Total Organ Failure and Coma tend to be the go-to symptoms when it comes the time to finally kill everyone. Total Organ Failure is a very lethal symptom, while Coma helps in slowing down the cure. Best of all, they're both connected to each other in the symptom tree, making it almost impossible to not pick both of them up.
- Many Mega-Brutal strategies favor Necrosis, since it allows the deceased to act as a transmission vector, allowing you to start killing much sooner than you normally would^note. The set of symptoms that leads to it — Rash, Sweating, Skin Lesions — also gives a decent amount of Severity and Infectivity overall.
Creepy Awesome: Planetary biological genocide? Awesome. Creepy? You bet.
Creepy Cute: Look at the Neurax Worm! Isn't that such a pettable harbinger of genocide/slavery?
- Even more so in "Santa's Little Helper"; just try not to squee at the mental images brought on by some of the Transmission descriptions, like "Stocking Filler" (Worms make themselves look cute and cuddly, then go to sleep in toy shops) or "Fair-Weather Friend" (Worms develop a dislike of rain, preferring to snuggle indoors with humans). Plus, the icon for the scenario is a worm popping out of a gift box wearing a santa hat.
Crosses the Line Twice: Killing a dog through deliberate infection? Cruel. Killing Kim Shardakian's Pugapoo dog with the Nipah virus, and "making a celebrity cry" and calling PETA in the process? Hysterical!
Demonic Spiders:
- Z-COM can feel like this when playing as the Necroa Virus. They'll appear the moment zombies start appearing, lock down one of the least infected nations in the world almost overnight and if you don't pin them down immediately with zombies, they'll start spreading and building bases around the world. They lock down countries quickly and once a country is locked down, even throwing millions of zombies at the problem doesn't seem to dislodge them without considerable effort. If the cure has already been found and Z-COM starts spreading, you might as well restart.
- Templar Industries are essentially the Z-COM of the Shadow Plague. They pop up quicker thanks to the regular killings that the vampire needs to make, essentially throwing true stealth out the window. Once they do, they'll start targeting vampire lairs with drone strikes (which you cannot avoid, since lairs are not mobile like the Simian Flu's Ape Colonies), fortify countries against vampire attack which gets stronger over time and significantly boost the cure research rate. Finally, when the vampire destroys one, it makes the others stronger. This, on top of the WHO research laboratories that are also contributing to the cure, means that you need to keep your vampire(s) on the move between lairs and other nations outside of Templar control, evolving the necessary vampire powers and symptoms for the Shadow Plague in order to take out these bases, or otherwise suffer a VERY swift defeat. Many Mega-Brutal strategies focus on the vampire first, making him strong enough to take down Templar Industries completely, before evolving anything related to the Shadow Plague. They're that dangerous.
Ensemble Dark Horse: The Neurax Worm, for its game-slaughtering abilities and oddly cute appearance.
Esoteric Happy Ending: There's no denying the fact that beating "Santa's Little Helper" is done by brainwashing everyone into cheering up. Whether or not the happiness-free dystopia that existed prior made this welcome depends on who you ask.
- It doesn't help that the country cameras still show total anarchy when you achieve full infection.
- Then again, if you lose in that scenario, happiness and fun are destroyed forever...
Game-Breaker:
- Scenarios giving you too much trouble? All hail the Neurax Worm. It laughs in the faces of most Scenarios due to the Trojan Plane mechanics bypassing travel restrictions, giving an instant win condition or at worst a significant one symptom advantage (Transcendence), giving out cool amounts of DNA, and infection rate. And the disease traits activated before a game (particularly the one which allows symptoms to not increase in cost) only make it easier to win. Even on Mega-Brutal, it's at worst a minor challenge if you play your cards right.
- Viruses' most notable trait is their tendency to mutate rapidly, which is normally either very bad or very good. However, traits exist that can substantially reduce the cost of devolving symptoms. Combine this with another trait which further increases mutation speed, and you can easily get massive heaps of DNA with no real drawbacks - and once it's time to start killing people off, half of the symptoms needed to increase lethality will come up with minimal waiting and no cost.
- Mutations are chosen to occur long before they trigger, but the game randomly picks which mutation the second it occurs. Proper use of Save Scumming (and the ability to mutate things such as abilities) can evolve very expensive and/or useful traits for free. This is extremely effective when playing the Mega-Brutal mode for Parasite which doesn't get as much DNA.
- Before the developers patched the "Where Is Everyone?" scenario to fix the Good Bad Bug, the Simian Flu was able to make to mode a breeze, to the point where even Mega-Brutal can be beaten in less than a year in-game. All thanks to the fact ape numbers hadn't been tweaked, so they massively outnumbered humans from the very start.
- Severity, or rather, the lack of it. If you get the value low enough, usually due to a lack of symptoms, you can easily infect the entire world with zero risk of it getting discovered until you evolve the symptoms that are needed in order to kill. Then once everybody is infected, you can simply evolve the necessary symptoms to kill rapidly and humanity will be dead before they can make any significant progress towards the cure. Logically this is easier to do for some plague types than others; parasites, thanks to their symbiotic upgrades, have it easiest, while Bioweapons start deadly and Nanoviruses start with cure development in progress so it becomes a moot point.
Genius Bonus: Biology enthusiasts might Squee at the amount of real scientific terms in the game.
Germans Love David Hasselhoff: Plague Inc. has a Chinese fanbase, becoming a #1 best seller over there in 2014 and a good number of Custom Scenarios are Chinese. This became more prevalent during the COVID-19 pandemic. Well, at least until the game got banned there.
Harsher in Hindsight: Whenever a pandemic happens in real life (Big or small), expect this game to fit in this trope.
- Two years after this game was released, a severe Ebola outbreak occured.
- In late 2019, a new strain of coronavirus was discovered in China (the first suspected case was discovered the 31st December). Then, the game was put on sale a couple weeks later, while the disease was still raging. The reason the game was on sale? Lunar New Year Sale (in other words: the sale celebrating the Chinese New Year). Soon after, the game was pulled from the App Store in China. The developers later released a "Cure Mode" DLC (where you play as an organization trying to stop the plague) in response to this real-life pandemic.
Hilarious in Hindsight: One of the government's statuses in the Simian Flu mode lists the military falling apart into rivaling factions; this turned out to be an accurate prediction for a major plot point in War for the Planet of the Apes, the sequel to Dawn.
Memetic Mutation:
- On videos about the Neurax Worm, it's very common to see people praising the Worm.
- Early during the COVID-19 Pandemic, a common joke was that COVID-19 was started by Area 51 raiders/agents playing Plague Inc. on the wrong computer/tablet. This was largely an offshoot of the "storm Area 51" joke event hosted the year prior.
Nausea Fuel: Upgrade enough in the Neurax/Necroa modes, and the◊ results◊ are quite disgusting.
Narm: The Necroa Virus' various origins are usually quite creepy... Unless said origin involves PfiGlax, which initially created the virus as a cure for AIDS, but instead it mutated the patients into zombies. Let me repeat that: A pharmaceutical company tried to create a cure for AIDS, and it failed so badly that it wound up zombifying the people it was supposed to cure. Epic Fail doesn't even begin to describe it.
No Problem with Licensed Games: The addition of the Simian Flu allows Plague Inc. to retain its widespread popularity and praise while also making it a licensed game, putting this trope into effect.
Not-So-Cheap Imitation: Of Pandemic, given that Plague Inc has quickly eclipsed it in popularity.
Polished Port: Plague Inc.: Evolved, for Steam, released February 20th, 2014.
Serial Numbers Filed Off: For Pandemic. Dark Realm Studios (the Pandemic dev company), tried to call out James Vaughan, Plague Inc.'s developer, on this, despite James already citing Pandemic as an inspiration.
Surprise Difficulty: Brutal Mode and Mega-Brutal mode, as well as Bio-Weapon, Smallpox, and Black Death. For those unaware, those three kill real fast, so different strategies are required before they kill all their hosts in less than 2 minutes of starting.
- Mad Cow Disease in its scenario. Not only does it start with symptoms with a lot of Severity (meaning you'll be noticed quite quickly, especially on higher difficulties), humans know a lot about it from previous outbreaks, so the cure goes fast. It's believed to be mathematically impossible to get Three Biohazards on Mega-Brutal in this scenario, it's that hard.
That One Achievement: There are a few achievements that are nigh impossible to get. Most of them will require Save Scumming (and that's not even possible on the original mobile version)
- "Not Another Zombie Game" (kill everyone in Necroa Virus without using zombies) was pretty hard until it was debuffed. And it's still pretty hard, mainly because the cure is researched at lightning speed, as the scenario is built with the idea zombies are utterly incurable in mind, so you need both complete subterfuge and a lot of luck. Want an easy way? Pretend your virus is a form of rabies, then devolve Zootonic Shift. Sounds easy? Well, before that you need to trigger two rabies-related events. Each has its own difficult moments. Guide Dang It! indeed.
- "Mr. President" requires you to beat the Shut Down Everything scenario with all 11 plagues on at least Normal. Ok. So far, sounds simple. It requires you to get 3 Biohazard symbols for all of them. Ok. Slightly harder but still easy. Wait, as a reminder, some plagues already have issues trying to easily spread (we're looking at you Fungus and no, your Spore Burst is a bit too random at times) on a normal playthrough. Well, with most countries closing off their borders before your plague can reach them the moment you get spotted, it's not going to be easy.
- "Disease Master" requires you to beat Mega-Brutal for all 11 Plagues. See That One Level below for the plagues involved in this achievement.
That One Boss:
- Greenland. Boats rarely travel there, and in normal cases, it's nigh impossible to reach it without special perks. Lampshaded in the Pirate Plague scenario description: "...How will anyone get to Greenland now?". This is compounded by Greenland's low population density and cold climate, which makes it very slow to infect, even once you do get there.
- To a lesser extent, Madagascar and the Caribbean, which also only have a single, relatively rarely visited port, as well as Iceland and New Zealand, which are slightly easier to infect due to their airports, but still get little traffic. However, Iceland is sparsely populated which makes infections happen much more slowly, and New Zealand is wealthy enough to afford advanced medicine that makes its population resistant to infection.
That One Level:
- The Smallpox scenario starts you off with an already severe and lethal pathogen, meaning you are likely to be spotted almost immediately without intervention. Worse yet, the cure meter rises much faster than a typical game to simulate the fact that scientists know how to treat smallpox. Finally, vaccines are put into place when the disease is spotted, slowing the infection rate of any country that has spotted the disease. Your special abilities include Vaccine Shields, which force you to spend DNA points just to bypass the existing smallpox vaccines. You can also evolve into a less lethal strain of smallpox, which will help you from getting snuffed out in the early portion of the game, but make it that much harder to kill humanity once you've got most of the population infected.
- Fungus. It's the most difficult plague to spread over distances, requiring you to invest a ridiculous amount of DNA points in transmission. In fact, its main mode of transmission is purchasing "Spore Bursts" which infect a random uninfected country anywhere in the world, and there's a very good chance that it will either be an island country or a country with a climate you haven't evolved to infect yet. And by the time you've brought the infection rates high enough and got enough people sick worldwide, the world will be well on its way to developing a cure and you will have spent so much DNA on evolving transmission that it will be very difficult to evolve your disease to be able to kill faster than the world can research. However, through using the Patho-Stasis Gene, the difficulty can be skipped considerably.
- Necroa Virus, mostly due to the massive Difficulty Spike it has. You need to spend tons of DNA to get through it, devolving symptoms costs you a lot of DNA points, even one symptom can get you noticed, and the Z-COM can survive even after you throw millions of fully upgraded zombies at them. Even when played with the "Creationist" perk, sometimes devolving a symptom causes the game to immediately throw another at you.
- The Shadow Plague, in combining elements from the previous three unique plagues, also seems to have adopted the Necroa Virus's above difficulty spike. Vampires are your main vector for spreading the plague. However, they drop like flies when fighting against Templar Forts if not sufficiently upgraded, and it is extremely expensive to create a new one. And once the actual plague starts, WHO labs that work extra-fast on the cure can pop up nearly anywhere, forcing you to get over there before they rush the cure (which, by the way, can't be slowed down with upgrades); even if you've wiped out every Templar fortress, they can end you indirectly. This means that keeping your starting vampire alive for most of, if not the entire game, is a must.
- Mutation 15's "Mad Cow Disease" scenario. It has the same issues as the Bubonic Plague and Smallpox, if not more. First, it's a Prion, making it have a slow reaction to symptoms and lacking major Infectivity. It also starts with a ton of Severity, increasing the chances to be detected early on. You can devolve most of the symptoms before that happens, but you'll have to put up with the extremely lethal Acute Encephalitis occasionally mutating. Transmissions are the only way to get the infection going, but they are expensive even with Trans-stasis. You also need to evolve a special ability to infect plants, and each transmission type increases mutation chance (which goes back to the Acute Encephalitis point). On top of that, it lacks the Prion's unique ability to slow cure research. Long-time Plague Inc. veteran Pravus Gaming said it took him 22 tries to beat it on Mega-Brutal. He got one star and declared getting three to be mathematically impossible, saying he struggled to do so on Casual.
- In Cure mode, the Prion is rough. Unlike when you're playing it, it is extremely contagious, typically infecting its entire starting continent before you can even find it, and the many hundreds of thousands that catch it before you can even know where to lockdown are almost all already dead. This means you have very little time to act before people start dropping like flies and global panic ensues. While you do get access to special actions to reduce said panic, you nevertheless have very little margin of action to prevent a game over. If that wasn't bad enough, the Prion starts with insanity, slowing down the cure and forcing you to take even more countermeasures against it.
- Also from Cure Mode, the Bio Weapon makes the Prion look like the Bacteria on Casual. The Bio Weapon's gimmick is that it gets more infectious and more lethal the more countries it infects, resulting in an exponential growth curve as the plague easily outpaces you. On the higher difficulty settings, it's so fast that a vaccine is pointless; you're better off trying to contain it to a single continent with the "Extreme Measures" ability and letting it die out, and if it starts anywhere but South America or maybe Africa^note, you're better off restarting. Even that is heavily luck-based; not only do you have a very narrow window of time to get the lockdown rolling, all those deaths with little attempt at slowing the spread is gonna tank your authority hard and fast, and fewer countries infected means fewer resources to counter this.
What Do You Mean, It's for Kids?: A game about wiping out the human race with all sorts of horrific plagues and viruses got a mere Everyone 10+ Rating. This might be because we never actually see the gory consequences of giving the population Necrosis and Total Organ Failure.

YMMV / Plague Inc.

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