The developer of pandemic simulator game Plague Inc. is headed in a slightly new direction for his next game. After Inc., which was surprisingly released Friday for iOS and Android, is about rebuilding after an apocalypse instead of causing one.
After Inc. is described as part 4X strategy game and part city builder. You build settlements in the wake of a zombie apocalypse and have to rebuild humanity while also surviving zombie attacks. This involves gathering resources and working your way through different rounds to unlock more tools.
This is a big change from Plague Inc., both in terms of mechanics but also themes. Plague Inc. was about spreading a pandemic with the goal to infect the entire world, which hits a bit close to home after the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I’ve tried to make a more happy and optimistic game this time,” designer James Vaughan told Gamefile about After Inc. “The world is lush and beautiful. The survivors have endured hardships but they are alive and able to rebuild. Only downside is the zombies, but [that’s] nothing that can’t be solved with some nails stuck in a cricket bat!”
After Inc. is also set to come to Steam as After Inc.: Revival in early access next year so Ndemic Creations can ensure the campaign is feature complete and test more content. You can wishlist it in the meantime.
Ndemic’s most famous and successful game is Plague Inc., a pandemic spreading simulator where you strategically work to increase the transmission rate of potentially deadly pathogen. While it’s an engaging game filled with surprising depth, it’s also been used as a tool for studying how diseases can become endemic, and has been recognized by the CDC.
It had been out for almost a decade by the time the COVID-19 pandemic hit, which led to a huge popularity surge, especially in China where it was installed around 2.2 million times in just a couple of months in early 2020. It was eventually removed from the Apple App Store. As of this writing, Vaughan says it’s reached 190 million players.
“Plague Inc. has been out for eight years now and whenever there is an outbreak of disease we see an increase in players, as people seek to find out more about how diseases spread and to understand the complexities of viral outbreaks,” Vaughan wrote on Ndemic’s blog in 2020. In 2021, Ndemic teamed up with the World Heath Organization for a public awareness campaign to inform people how to remain healthy and avoid infection during a pandemic.
In the wake of COVID-19, Ndemic even released a free new mode in Plague Inc. called Save the World where you have to fight a pathogen as it spreads.
Acer’s Predator Atlas 8 finally has a US release date and price, several months after the company first showed off the handheld in May. The highlight is the Intel Arc G3 Extreme chip inside, which has been adopted by only a couple of other consoles besides the Atlas 8. This version will go on sale exclusively at Best Buy on November 1 for $1,299.99.
Acer originally said the Atlas 8 would arrive in North America in October, but left pricing open at the time. The launch came amid the ongoing DRAM crunch, which has made memory more expensive across the PC industry and complicated pricing for hardware makers.
Gaming laptops and I have a complicated relationship. One of my first gaming rigs was an Acer Predator that was already outdated when I bought it. I was a broke college kid, and that was the best I could afford. So trying out high-end gaming laptops is always fun. But ASUS' ROG Zephyrus G14 is a lot more than a laptop that can run AAA games. It is portable, so you're not lugging around a 2.5kg machine everywhere you go. It is built well, none of that plastic chassis, and can even function as a normal laptop outside of just gaming.
Google Play is borrowing one of the Nintendo Switch’s most useful little tricks. A new Sidekick tool called Playbacks captures a short clip after something interesting has already happened, sparing players from running a screen recorder throughout an entire game.
Playbacks is part of Google Play Store v53.8 and keeps saved clips on the phone. Google first announced it earlier this month, but the new Play Store update marks its arrival for players. Anyone who has watched a perfect win vanish because the record button came too late already understands the appeal.