There must be some stray DNA in the water lately. In November, disappointing 2008 everything sim Spore inexplicably popped back up in the news. Then in December, I checked out Everything is Crab, a clever roguelike that turned out to realise some of that game’s lost potential. Now I’m playing Pathogenic, another game that pulls off the same trick. All these years later, one of EA’s weirdest experiments seems to be occupying hearts and minds once more.
Where Everything is Crab reimagines Spore’s “creature stage”, Pathogenic is (as you might have guessed from the name) a take on the “cell stage”. It’s not quite 1:1—rather than an early single-celled organism swimming through the primordial goop, you’re a microscopic parasite invading a human body. But it embraces the same idea of evolution and customisation, to so far pretty impressive results.
The action plays out like a twin-stick shooter, my parasite’s undulating “secretors” functioning as guns and my host’s aggressive antibodies serving as the enemies. Combat is agreeably slick, in both senses of the word—piloting my tiny creature around is responsive and satisfying, but also has a swimmy, organic feel appropriate to the gloopy environment.
The real fun though is of course in customising my organism. Any time outside of combat I’m free to snap into the editor and move “organelles” around the different nodes of its structure, changing how I shoot and move but also how different buffs and synergies interact with each other via pathways between them.
Defeating powerful enemies grants new parts to play with and incorporate into my increasingly nightmarish creature, and with enough stolen DNA I can even evolve into an entirely new form, with stat modifiers and a different configuration of nodes.
Pretty soon my humble little blob has turned into a jellyfish of death, racing along with flailing tentacles and spewing a flamethrower-like stream of acid at anything that moves. Thanks to my combination of organelles, my damage increases whenever I hit something but falls whenever I miss, encouraging strategic strikes rather than spraying and praying—a great combo for feeling like a tiny but deadly predator.
There are some clever quality-of-life touches to the roguelike structure: The subtle UI keeps the level map, my current ammo, and a display of relevant organelles (such as the one charging up that damage buff in my build) always clearly in view without being distracting. And I particularly like how easy it is to navigate around—if you’ve missed something or want to take a different path, you can instantly fast travel to any room you’ve already cleared, making backtracking a breeze.
Sadly, my killer jellyfish’s adventure ends in the stomach, victim to a barrage of explosive blobs. But that first promising run earns me enough plasmid fragments to unlock some new starting forms for the future, with their own special features. I’m keen to try out the fungal spore next, a menacing floating orb—where my first creature controlled like an organic X-Wing dogfighting the immune system, this one’s more like a mini Death Star, striking out all around it but unable to swivel. Looking at this thing, I finally understand why athlete’s foot is so hard to get rid of.
If you too pine for what could have been back in 2008, you can play Pathogenic’s demo for free now, and I definitely recommend it—for a game still in development, it already feels surprisingly polished. Now all we need is games based on Spore’s other three stages, and some kind of elaborate mod that links them all together… sorry, now I’m getting as over-ambitious as Will Wright once did.
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