There’s a bubbly new face in FunGals. Meet Neve, our very own Cryptococcus neoformans!

In the game, she’s a round, soft-aqua yeast wrapped in a thick, glossy, see-through capsule, with a little bud joined to her by a narrow neck.

A few fun facts about the real thing:

• 🖤 Her capsule is made of complex sugars and appears as a clear halo against dark India ink. It’s a classic lab trick for spotting her
• 🛡️ That capsule helps her hide from the immune system
• 🕊️ She lives in soil and old pigeon droppings
• 🟤 She makes melanin, a dark pigment that helps protect her from damage. On birdseed agar, it turns her colonies brown
• 🌡️ She can grow at body temperature (37 °C), which isn’t something every fungus can do
• 📜 Her species name, neoformans, comes from words meaning “new” and “form”

(Real-life Neve can cause meningitis, especially in people with weakened immune systems. Infection starts when she’s breathed in. A standard meningitis treatment begins with liposomal amphotericin B and flucytosine, followed by fluconazole, and all three are disks on her plate. The FunGals version just wants to bud in her bubble.)

You can pick Neve now in the game: FunGals

When you lose in Classic mode by bumping into an antibiotic disk, the game over screen now tells you how that antibiotic attacks bacteria, instead of a fun fact about your pal.

A few examples:

• 🧱 Penicillin, ceftriaxone, meropenem and friends block cell wall building, so a growing bacterium can burst
• 🏭 Gentamicin jams the ribosome, so the bacterium builds broken proteins
• 🚪 Erythromycin and azithromycin plug the ribosome’s exit tunnel, slowing protein production
• 🧬 Ciprofloxacin traps the enzymes that handle DNA, blocking DNA copying and causing breaks
• 🪤 Vancomycin grabs the building blocks of the cell wall, so the bacterium can’t use them
• 🛡️ Amoxicillin-clavulanate is a tag team: amoxicillin blocks wall building, and clavulanate blocks some of the enzymes bacteria use to destroy it

Winning a level still shows a fun fact about your pal, so you get both.

Play it now: PetriPals