This party game is like Jackbox, except you're causing or preventing humanity's extinction—you can probably guess which side I picked

Project Planet party game — (Image credit: Fifth Harbour Studios)

Maybe it's the fact that I've just finished my umpteenth playthrough of Final Fantasy 7, but sometimes I get the feeling that one of us should summon Meteor and end all this nonsense once and for all. Climb the kudzu vines that wrap the Sears Tower, and all that. I know I'm not the only one who occasionally drifts into strange fantasies about the end of the world, though—a game that just came out on Steam not only lets you do exactly that, it turns those idle fantasies into a party.

Project Planet - Earth vs Humanity features one player as the planet. Like, the actual Earth—big role. This player (the good guy, obviously) is tasked with saving the place from destruction by reducing the human population to zero like a full-blown JRPG baddie. They do that by expending their force to inflict disasters and trigger crises that the other players have to deal with.

If humanity does manage to survive, however, the winner is the player who has the most remaining power—making it a cooperative game with a competitive edge. Spend all your resources being helpful and you'll still lose, incentivizing players to sabotage one another in an attempt to win.

Only one player has to actually buy the game and everyone else can plug in via a mobile device, making Project Planet a bit like Jackbox—except instead of trying to come up with the best punchline for the world's worst setup, you're trying to save (or destroy!) the planet. I took a quick spin through the demo, and it only took me about 30 minutes to kill off all eight billion or so humans with my virus.

Russ has been playing PC games since the top of the line graphics were in ASCII and has been obsessed with them just about as long. After a coordinated influence campaign to bamboozle his parents into getting a high speed internet connection to play EverQuest, his fate was well and truly sealed. When he's not writing about videogames, he's teaching karate, cooking an overly complicated dish, or attempting to raise his daughter with a well rounded classical education (Civilization, Doom, and Baldur's Gate, of course). He's probably mapping in Path of Exile right now.