I Am Plague First Look: I Became the Dark Lord of Rat Spreadsheets
I Am Plague has a fantastic premise and, after about an hour in its current playtest, I wanted almost nothing to do with actually playing it.
You are the single will behind a plague-like rat hivemind, shaping thousands of rodents as they climb a fortress, devour enemies and grow increasingly horrible. What I actually did was watch automated combat at 4x speed, choose percentage buffs, occasionally upgrade another part of a dead rat and slowly become more interested in my phone.
To be fair to I Am Plague, none of this is hidden. The Steam page explicitly calls it an incremental game with automatic combat, where your build determines what happens in battle. So this isn't a case of some developer promising me Total War: Rodent Edition and delivering Microsoft Excel with mange. The game is remarkably honest about what it is. I just hadn't realised quite how much of “become the will behind thousands of rats” would involve watching thousands of rats get on perfectly well without me.
If you enjoy idle games where the pleasure comes from optimising numbers and watching those numbers eventually murder other numbers, there may be something here for you. If the attraction is personally controlling an enormous rat swarm and becoming a furry biblical catastrophe, temper that expectation immediately.
The rats have unionised.
They don't need you.
If controlling a rat plague sounded better before the rats unionised and automated your job, see what other games actually let you be the monster. Some villains even permit employee participation.
Apparently the swarm knows what to do
I Am Plague wastes absolutely no time establishing our working relationship.
I'm the Lord of Rats. Excellent. Conquering the world with my rats. Finally, an appropriate career.
Combat begins almost immediately and the game explains that the swarm knows what to do and I shouldn't interfere.
Right.
So I sit there.
The rats attack automatically. Enemies attack automatically. My contribution to the downfall of civilisation is initially somewhere between middle management and owning the building.
Luckily, there is a speed-up button.
Less luckily, my terrifying plague swarm then failed on floor one.
At least it wasn't my fault.
Back at the hub, I was directed towards the Flesh Tree, where I could improve my rats using resources gathered from failed runs. There was a dead rat available to dissect, except I couldn't afford to dissect it yet, so off we went to watch the rats fail floor one again.
They did.
Eventually I upgraded their claws. This also revealed more organs and body parts that could be improved.
Excellent. My dark campaign against humanity had become veterinary accounting.
Back into combat.
They failed floor one again.
This is when the basic rhythm became obvious: let the rats fight, fail, collect currency, buy another improvement, send them back, repeat until mathematics permits passage.
Fear me, for my click now deals one damage
Things do expand.
I eventually acquired a bat skull which allowed me to click enemies for extra damage.
One damage.
Not one percent. Not some enormously satisfying plague strike where a screaming wall of vermin descends from the heavens.
-1 HP per click.
I could spam-click enemies if I wanted.
Obviously I'm not going to click like a peasant.
The more interesting progression comes from mutations, skulls, the Flesh Tree, Bone Tree and various upgrades that improve damage, healing and other statistics. A goblin skull gave me +15% claw damage. Mutations appear between floors, letting you slowly assemble a build. Shops eventually arrive with still more choices.
There is unquestionably a progression system here.
My problem was that almost everything I encountered translated back into the same thing: numbers becoming more favourable while I continued watching.
Damage goes up. Healing improves. More mutations become available. Another multiplier joins the enormous mathematical conspiracy occurring behind the rats.
I didn't feel like the Lord of Rats.
I felt like the Dark Lord of Math.
Theoretically I was becoming more powerful. Emotionally, someone might as well have emailed me an updated spreadsheet.
Then I caught myself scrolling through my phone
By run five, the rats were climbing through several floors while I watched at 4x speed and selected mutations between them.
By run six, I caught myself scrolling through my phone.
That's probably the most useful thing I can tell you about my hour with I Am Plague.
Not because every videogame needs constant explosions, button combinations and a man shouting about destiny through a radio. Slow and passive games can be enormously absorbing.
But I Am Plague hadn't made me peacefully absorbed.
It had made me available for other activities.
The game finished floor five and unlocked another upgrade path.
Notice that sentence.
The game finished floor five.
Not me.
The game did.
I was present in roughly the same sense that a passenger is involved in motorway infrastructure.
Soon I unlocked the ability to begin at floor five while still receiving the rewards from the skipped floors. That's sensible. It avoids wasting even more time replaying content that has already become trivial.
The rats then pushed onwards automatically.
And I started wishing there was a 1000x speed setting.
Then I thought an instant "skip autocombat" button would be even better.
And that's when the entire thing became slightly awkward.
Because if my preferred way of experiencing your gameplay is not experiencing the gameplay, what exactly are we preserving?
Prefer your horror from the wrong side of the door? Dive into CRIMENET’s reverse-horror coverage, where being chased is replaced by being the reason everyone else starts running.
Somewhere around floor ten I remembered the laundry
There isn't much visual evolution in the section I played either. I encountered roughly ten enemy types and the presentation reminded me of very old PC games, particularly The Elder Scrolls: Arena or the original Wasteland.
That isn't necessarily criticism. It has an intentionally ancient, grimy appearance that fits the whole diseased-rat-army business rather nicely.
The problem is that I wasn't seeing enough mechanical change to keep pulling my attention back onto the screen.
By run eight, the rats were pushing towards floor ten and I genuinely began thinking about what household chores I still needed to do.
That is an extraordinary achievement for a game about devouring civilisation with plague vermin.
A boss finally displayed white circles I could click.
Interaction!
I clicked.
Minus one damage.
Civilisation trembled.
The rats died.
I briefly considered equipping the clicking skull permanently just so I would have something to do, then realised I could probably use I Am Plague as a metronome and play guitar while the rats handled the actual videogame.
Eventually it offered to automate my remaining responsibilities
After several attempts, my upgraded swarm was one-shotting regular enemies and finally killed the worm boss on floor ten.
Shops unlocked. Progress continued. Eventually I could begin directly from floor ten.
Then the game presented me with around 25 mutation choices during another run.
By this point I'd established that balancing damage and healing seemed to be the key to getting farther, but the constant buffet of percentage improvements had stopped feeling meaningful. I wasn't excited about building something. I was buying whatever looked useful enough to make the automated thing automate more effectively.
And then I unlocked more automation.
The game can eventually choose mutations for you too.
That might be a wonderful quality-of-life feature for somebody already invested in the optimisation loop.
For me it felt like being told my position had been made redundant by the software I was supposed to be enjoying.
I had already outsourced combat to the rats.
Now the rats had started outsourcing me.
Later I unlocked manual targeting, which technically gave me more influence over combat. By then they had reached floor 18.
I had reached the end of my patience considerably earlier.
So is the I Am Plague playtest worth trying?
It's free, the current playtest is easy to access, and I Am Plague certainly has systems to dig into. Mutations, skulls, upgrades, shops and increasingly stronger runs give number-focused players plenty to optimise.
So if that sounds appealing, try it. My reaction to an idle game isn't a universal judgement on people who enjoy watching an optimisation machine gradually become monstrous.
But do not go there primarily because the words "control thousands of rats" made you imagine actively commanding thousands of rats.
That was exactly what interested me.
I never felt it.
For most of my hour, the swarm was effectively a blob of automated damage and my role was deciding which arithmetic should improve it next.
That's the strange tragedy of I Am Plague so far. The fantasy is spectacular. A corpse-eating rat hivemind climbing hundreds of fortress levels should be practically illegal levels of CRIMENET bait.
Then the game tells you the swarm knows what to do.
And tells you not to interfere.
There are stranger systems lurking beneath gaming’s floorboards than automated rat accountancy. Keep digging through CRIMENET’s dark-system discoveries and see what else probably should have remained buried.
I Am Plague FAQ
Is I Am Plague an idle game?
Yes. Combat is largely automated. Your main involvement is choosing mutations, upgrading your rats and improving damage, healing and other stats while the swarm handles the actual fighting.
Do you directly control the rat swarm?
Not really. The rats move and attack automatically. Later you can choose targets and interact with certain enemies, but this is much closer to managing an automated swarm than personally commanding thousands of rats.
How does combat work in I Am Plague?
Your build determines most of the outcome. Mutations, skulls and upgrades increase various stats, while the rats fight automatically. Some abilities let you click enemies for extra damage, and bosses can include timed clicking interactions.
Is the I Am Plague playtest worth playing?
It's worth trying if you already enjoy idle games, autobattlers and optimising percentage-based builds. If the main attraction is actively controlling a giant rat hivemind, the current playtest may feel much more passive than expected.
How long did we play I Am Plague?
We played the current playtest for around 60 minutes, reaching approximately floor 18 before deciding we'd seen enough of the core loop.
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