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Remember Plague Inc.? The outbreak sim that had a bit of a moment during the pandemic. Call it morbid curiosity or a desperate attempt to make sense of what was happening, but interest saw the game shoot up the Steam best seller list. Plague Inc. let you nurse a fledgling pathogen, evolve it into a deadly globe-sweeping plague, and ultimately rid the earth of its big-brained bipedal apes. Developed by DryGin Studios, Extinction Day is a doomsday sim with the same aim. Except it’s supercharged chaos as you combine not just diseases but also natural disasters, wars, and other catastrophic events.
You’re presented with a globe dotted with little blue humans, denoting population concentrations more or less in line with the real world. The Steam blurb explains that the game simulates over 80,000 humans simultaneously and their reaction to catastrophes using real-world data for an authentic simulation. Fancy stuff, although in practice it’s more like playing on one of those interactive maps you see on the nightly news. No slight; the format works a treat.
Drop a storm on New York or London. Before long, it will spread eventually reaching across the country, and you can watch as those blue dots start to squirm, turning yellow, then ideally red to represent mass casualties. This death is currency to unlock upgrades, ranging from damage boosts, spread speed modifiers, and attack size enhancers. The more of the world you devastate, the easier it is to wreak havoc elsewhere.
Aside from storms, you can employ tornadoes, respiratory outbreaks, asteroid impacts, forest fires, earthquakes, parasites, volcanoes, and even a zombie outbreak, though most of these are frustratingly out of bounds in the demo build. Aside from natural disasters, you can spark wars, unleash nuclear strikes, and trigger civil unrest. There’s a twisted fun in chaining these in just the right way and watching them dynamically spread across the globe. It’s villain’s work for sure, but a neat antithesis to the save-the-worlding that permeates games.
Before long chaos will start to spread. Captured by VideoGamer
Start small and use disasters strategically to wipe out the planet. Captured by VideoGamer
The ultimate goal. Captured by VideoGamer
You can unlock upgrades to make disasters even more devastating. Captured by VideoGamer
The humans will push back with preventative measures such as confinement lockdowns during respiratory outbreaks, their alertness to disasters increasing and making it harder to effectively wipe them out. It’s strategic: unleash chaos too fast and it will peter out; go too slow and there won’t be enough momentum to bring out civilizational collapse. You can’t spread a disease if everyone on a continent is already dead. To help, you can also intervene in human affairs through upgrades that reduce alertness and even spend corruption points to reverse preventative measures.
If you fancy giving it a whirl, the demo is out now on Steam and lets you play through the first four scenarios. As for the Early Access release, it’s pencilled in for a rather noncommittal Q4 2025, so hopefully it will see the light of day before the year comes to an end. Expect a story-driven campaign made up of various extinction scenarios and several challenge game modes. The dev is also cooking up a sandbox mode that removes all restrictions and lets you play unhindered by objectives and such.
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