Character from Plague Inc. by Ndemic Creations
The brain-eater — a misfolded protein that hides in neural tissue, slowly destroying cognitive function while making itself nearly impossible to cure.
Prion is the anti-cure specialist. Its signature ability — Neural Atrophy — directly slows cure research by degrading the cognitive function of the scientists trying to study it. The more it spreads, the stupider the people fighting it become. This is, strategically and thematically, the cruelest pathogen in the game. Prion plays a slow, insidious game. It doesn't spread fast. It doesn't kill fast. It doesn't do anything fast. What it does is make the cure bar crawl while it methodically works its way through the global population. By the time symptoms become obvious, the researchers tasked with developing a cure are operating at diminished capacity — slower to analyze samples, slower to coordinate international efforts, slower to think. The horror of prion diseases in real life — CJD, kuru, mad cow — maps directly onto the gameplay experience. There's something uniquely unsettling about a pathogen that isn't alive, can't be killed with antibiotics, and destroys the organ responsible for understanding it. Prion doesn't outrun the cure. It lobotomizes the cure.
Not a living organism at all — a misfolded protein that forces other proteins to adopt its corrupted shape, cascading through neural tissue like a chain reaction. On the evolution screen, its pathways have a jagged, crystalline quality, as if the interface itself is degrading. Neural Atrophy nodes pulse with a sickly yellow light.
Also known as: Prion Disease, The Brain-Eater, Misfolded Protein