Plague Inc was pretty much the game to go for if you wanted to see if a brand new disease can wipe out mankind. It even got anti-vaxxers as a buff three years ago, slightly after COVID-19 first hit, to account for the ever increasing sentiment. Now though, there’s a similar game around, but it’s tailored specifically with this new pandemic in mind. Fittingly, it’s simply called Covid Simulator.
The name is very on the nose for what it is. The game has no win conditions. Instead, it just lets you run simulation after simulation of the spread of COVID-19 in an office space. You get to design the work place, designate if workers must be masked or vaccinated to be allowed to work, or even promote alternative meds. Covid Simulator even allows you to make the virus mutate.
Then, based on those decisions, you’ll see workers get infected, pick up alternative medicine, develop antivax beliefs, or die. And since you’re running a business, Covid Simulator will also show you if your business profits or goes in debt based on the results of those decisions.
Like the aforementioned Plague Inc, the dev at Coldrice Games says that they are not a statistician or virologist. Instead, the predicted outcomes of Covid Simulator are done based on the US CDC stats. There’s a free demo as well as a paid version on itch.io that you can get right now, the latter with a price of US$4.99 (~RM21). Or, you can wait for it to be released on Steam on 25 January to get it.
(Source: Coldrice Games [1], [2], Steam via Kotaku)
