One rat is a joke. A few thousand of them sharing one brain is a problem for everybody upstairs. That’s the pitch behind I Am Plague, a dark incremental roguelite from developer Greedy Games and publisher Digital Vortex Entertainment, and you can play it right now. The game was revealed today alongside an open playtest on Steam that runs from 6 October to 20 October.
You don’t play a hero here. You play the hivemind of a rat colony that’s spent centuries scraping by in the dark under humanity’s grand capital. Nobody up there has noticed you. Your job is to fix that by chewing your way up through more than 200 floors of an underground fortress, eating everything that gets in the way.
A Rat Swarm Climbing 200 Floors
Combat is automatic. You don’t steer every claw swipe yourself. Instead, the swarm fights on its own and you focus on the build. Each floor throws a new enemy at you, from armored knights to bosses like the Elder Sister, and the screenshots show floor counters and boss names right at the top of the screen so you always know how deep you are.
Along the way you’ll run into shops, text-based events and branching routes, so runs shouldn’t all play out the same. Bosses get more dangerous the higher you climb, and the first few attempts are going to end badly. The developers say so directly. The pack starts weak and your early trips through the fortress will probably end in death.
Image: Digital Vortex Entertainment50+ Mutations and Stolen Skulls
The build side is where this gets interesting. There are more than 50 mutations spread across several rarity tiers, and the idea is to stack them into nasty synergies. You can add status effects to your claw attacks, get more health back from eating enemies, or grow bone armor to soak hits. One mutation card in the screenshots gives you extra damage for every gold skull you hold, which tells you the game wants you thinking about combos, not single upgrades.
Then there are Visages. As you explore the fortress you can unlock these by placing enemy skulls on top of the swarm. Wearing a skull switches your character class and hands you new abilities. New enemy types show up as you climb, and harvesting them is how you unlock those extra classes. Rats in a dead knight’s helmet is a great image, and I’m into it.
Image: Digital Vortex EntertainmentThe Tree of Flesh and the Tree of Bones
Dying isn’t wasted time. Back in the lair you spend the flesh and bones you’ve collected from fallen enemies on two upgrade trees, the Tree of Flesh and the Tree of Bones. These permanently boost the colony’s base stats and unlock new mutations for later runs. One screenshot of the Flesh Tree shows a Heart upgrade that raises maximum health as the swarm grows, with 20 levels to work through.
The further you push toward the surface, the more ways you get to specialize the swarm on the next attempt. Steam’s own description sums it up neatly: every death makes you stronger. That’s the incremental loop in a nutshell. Lose, grow, go again.
Image: Digital Vortex EntertainmentHow to Join the Playtest Before 20 October
The playtest is live now on PC through Steam and closes on 20 October. It’s Windows only, according to the store page. The page itself is available in English, Chinese (Simplified), Japanese, Korean, German, Portuguese (Portugal), Polish and Russian. There’s no firm launch date yet. Steam currently lists the full release for 2027.
Digital Vortex is a new publisher based in Nicosia, Cyprus. Its team includes industry veterans who’ve worked on games like Atomic Heart, Lost Ark and PUBG Battlegrounds, and its label already has DREADMOOR and Tiny Eden. Greedy Games is handling development.
My view? Auto-battler roguelites live or die on how good the build crafting feels, and a swarm that literally wears its victims’ skulls is a strong hook. Two free weeks is plenty of time to find out if the climb holds up. If you’ve got a soft spot for games where you play the monster, grab the playtest and see how far your rats get.