Plague Inc: Scenario Creator

Review by eFreeware

The most interesting thing about Plague Inc: Scenario Creator is that it isn't a game at all. It is a companion tool from Ndemic Creations that lets players design their own scenarios for the original Plague Inc. If you have ever finished a run and thought the disease you just built deserved its own rules, this is the app that lets you write them.

That focus decides who it is for. It suits players who already own Plague Inc. and want to move from playing scenarios to making them, whether that means a joke outbreak among friends or a carefully balanced plague with its own win conditions. It is a paid download at $3.99, with no ads and no in-app purchases, and it has been available since April 2017.

The appeal is not the act of playing. It is the act of designing: naming a plague, deciding how it spreads, choosing which countries matter and writing the text that appears when something goes wrong. If that sounds like work rather than fun, the tool will feel like work. If it sounds like the best part of the game, this is where that part lives.

Five labs, each with a different job

The creator is organized around five labs, and the developer lets you choose which ones to use for any given scenario. The Core lab covers the scenario's basic details, its backstory text, how it is won and its translations. This is where a scenario gets its identity and its rules for success.

The Disease lab is where the plague itself takes shape. You build a disease of your own design, setting its stats and shaping its symptoms, abilities and transmission. Rather than picking from the standard set, you set the numbers and the behavior yourself, which is what makes a scenario feel different from the base game.

The World lab moves outward to the map. You set how each country behaves, from its population and climate to its health spending and air links. That is the level at which a scenario stops being about a disease and starts being about the world it lands in, and it is where an idea like a country evacuating its population to the moon would begin to take shape.

The Government lab covers how nations respond. You can dictate the actions governments take against your disease, modifying existing actions or creating entirely new ones. The Events lab, aimed at advanced users, uses scripting to add events and narrative pop-ups. Between the five, a scenario can be as small as a tweaked disease or as large as a rewritten world.

What you can actually build

The examples the developer gives are deliberately strange, and they are a fair picture of the range. A cat pandemic, an infectious political meme, an alien parasite that makes people's heads explode, a YouTube star that turns people into zombies, a travel company running hundreds of flights to Greenland. The tool is built to accommodate ideas that the original game would never ship.

It also accommodates the opposite instinct. If you would rather model how a real disease might spread, the World lab's country attributes and the Disease lab's custom stats give you the pieces to try. The same five labs serve both the absurd and the serious, which is unusual for a creation tool tied to a game.

The Events lab is the part that will decide how far you go. Scripting events and pop-ups is the difference between a scenario that plays differently and one that tells a story as it plays. The developer flags it for advanced users, and that framing seems right: the other four labs are about setting values, while this one is about writing logic.

Sharing is built into the process

Once a scenario is finished, you choose who to infect with it. You can send it directly to friends by email, or share a link through services like Twitter and Facebook. That covers the small-audience case, where a scenario is made for a handful of people who will recognize the joke.

The other option is publication. Scenarios can be shared with a large global audience at the click of a button, and the developer says you can then check how many people play yours and what they make of it. That feedback loop is the reason to publish rather than just share: a scenario that gets played tells you something about whether the design works.

The two paths are not mutually exclusive, and the order matters less than the fact that both exist. A scenario can start as something you send to three friends and end up published if it holds up. The statistics the developer mentions are the part that would keep me interested, since they turn a finished scenario into something you can still adjust.

What it requires from you

This is a tool for creating custom scenarios rather than a game, and the original Plague Inc. has to be installed to play them. The app is meant to sit alongside the game rather than replace it.

The cost is $3.99. There are no ads and no in-app purchases, so the price is the whole price. For a tool that pairs with a game you already own, that is a straightforward proposition.

The other requirement is patience with the structure. Five labs with different focuses mean a complete scenario touches several parts of the app, and the Events lab in particular asks for scripting rather than simple settings. The developer's own labeling of that lab as advanced is a reasonable signal about where the effort concentrates.

How to approach a first scenario

The sensible way in is to start with the Disease lab and the Core lab together. Build one plague with stats and symptoms you care about, give it a name and a win condition, and stop there. That produces a scenario that plays differently from the base game without requiring you to touch the map or write any scripting.

The World lab is the natural next step. If your first scenario felt too easy or too fast, this is where you correct it.

The Government lab and the Events lab are best saved for when the first two feel limiting. Modifying government responses or creating new ones changes how the world pushes back, and scripting events changes what the player sees while it happens. Doing those first, before you know what your disease does, is likely to produce a scenario that is busy rather than coherent.

Publishing is worth treating as a later step rather than the goal. The developer's statistics on plays and player opinion are most useful once you have a scenario you are happy with, because they tell you whether other people read it the way you intended. Sending a link to a friend first is a cheaper way to find that out.

A tool for players who already own the game

Plague Inc: Scenario Creator does one thing and does it in depth: it turns players of Plague Inc. into designers of Plague Inc. content. The five labs cover everything from a disease's stats to a country's health care budget, the sharing options cover both a private link and a worldwide release, and the price is a single $3.99 with no ads or purchases attached.

The install base of over 100,000 and a 4.4 average from roughly 2,850 ratings suggest the tool has found an audience among people who were already invested in the game. That is the audience it is built for. It assumes you own Plague Inc., it assumes you want to build rather than play, and it assumes you are willing to learn a scripting tool if your idea needs one.

If you have scenarios in mind and the game already installed, this is a reasonable purchase at the price. If you are looking for something to play, the developer is direct that this is not it. The decision is really about which side of the game you enjoy more.

What's new in version 1.2.9

1.2.9: Improved backend systems