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.
