Nightmare: Malaria
- Brand
- Against Malaria Foundation
- Year
- 2013
- Objective
- Awareness
- Industry
- Other
- Mechanic
- Adventure & Quest
- Platform
- App
- Agency
- Q Department
- With
- Psyop
Objective
Against Malaria Foundation needed to get one fact to stick: a $3 insecticide-treated bed net is still the cheapest, most effective way to stop malaria, and to turn that fact into donations. Rather than another PSA, the foundation and Psyop built something a player would stay with longer than a 30-second spot and that could ask for money at a moment the player actually cared. The game also gave Psyop's non-profit training arm, EGG, its first real game project and client.
Solution
You play a little girl navigating her own bloodstream after a mosquito bite, running and jumping through 18 thick, dreamlike levels split between two zones, Blood and Brain. You can't fight anything — only dodge, duck, and hide from what's chasing you, while grabbing stray teddy bears scattered through each level to keep moving forward. Rounds are short: you either clear a level in under a minute or die trying, and there's no combat button to save you, only a net-shaped safe zone that mirrors the real object the campaign is selling. Every death interrupts the game with a soft prompt to donate $3 for a bed net and a link through to the foundation's site. The whole thing opens with a rhymed prologue read by Susan Sarandon, following the girl through a bright candy-colored dream before the bite drags her into the nightmare proper.
Results
102,000 players and 145,000 sessions in the first week (average session 5:09); over 160,000 downloads across 181 countries in the first 10 days; more than half of players were outside the US; 40,000 click-throughs to the Against Malaria Foundation site.
- 1
The game opens with a spoken prologue: a girl in a bright, candy-colored dream while a narrator recites a grim rhyme about "the evil King Malaria" spreading his parasites.
- 2
A mosquito bite drops the girl into a nightmare inside her own infected bloodstream, where the platforming begins.
- 3
Players move the girl forward and back and make her jump through 2D levels; the controls are deliberately loose and slippery to convey resistance from the body's own fluids, and soft, yielding ground and internal currents push her off course.
- 4
Each level's goal is to collect stranded teddy bears tucked into hard-to-reach, dangerous spots; a level isn't cleared until all of them are found.
- 5
Hazards include blockages of blood cells to jump over and pools of green pus that kill on contact, plus patrolling mosquitoes that break formation and chase the girl once they sense her — they can't be fought, only evaded.
- 6
Mosquito netting is the only safe zone on a level, sheltering the girl from attack, mirroring its real-world role in malaria prevention.
- 7
Levels are short and resolve quickly in either success or death, and dying is frequent.
- 8
Every death triggers a gentle real-world reminder that $3 buys a mosquito net that prevents infection, turning failure into a prompt to donate.
- 9
Progression runs through two worlds, Blood and Brain, totaling 18 levels (later Android builds expand this to 21, with the first world extended to 12).
- 10
From the game or its campaign site, players can click through to the Against Malaria Foundation to donate — the campaign's ultimate call to action.
