Get your bad on: 10 video games that let you play as the worst villains imaginable

There’s a long tradition of Star Wars video games letting the Dark Side have its day—up to and including the venerable TIE Fighter series of space-flight simulators, which let you serve as one of the Empire’s finest, and the Force Unleashed games, which put you in the saber-wielding hands of Darth Vader’s secret apprentice. But for our money, no Star Wars game lets you kick the Sith out of things in a nastier way than BioWare’s Knights Of The Old Republic. Sure, you can play things like a Jedi-two-shoes, redeeming bad guys on the Sith planet of Korriban and spouting endless platitudes about the Force. Or you can rampage across the galaxy with your own personal assassination bot by your side, corrupting your followers, and, in one of the single darkest choices we’ve ever made in a video game, killing off your teen sidekick by mind-tricking her Wookiee best friend into pulling the trigger himself. (Warning: Massive, massive spoilers for a 20-year-old video game in that link.) It’s the Dark Side of gaming at its nastiest.

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If you want your evil a bit more on the cartoon-y side, consider the second installment of Triumph Studios’ semi-comedic Sauron simulator series Overlord. Whereas the first game let squeamish tyrants opt out of some of the nastier choices—you could even, shudder, give away resources as charity—the second game presents its big choices as matters of style and priority, not morality. Do you unleash wanton destruction on the land, leaving your enemies’ homes a blackened husk as your cartoon-y Minions dance in the wreckage? Or do you focus on the “Domination” path, with its emphasis on tyranny, empire-building, and forced servitude? Hey, don’t look at us: You’re the one who loaded up a game with a guy with a massive spiked helmet on the cover.

As far as unlikely video game protagonists go, it’s hard to beat a hoodie-wearing version of the villainous creature from John Carpenter’s The Thing. And yet that’s essentially who Prototype “hero” Alex Mercer is: A shape-shifting, very-sticky-seeming conglomeration of cells and tentacles who can look like anyone, and eat anyone, if it lets him get one up on the military forces that are hunting him. Built by the team that also created excellent not-quite-a-villain game Hulk: Ultimate Destruction, Prototype is an absolute blast to play, as Alex’s tools let you get up to some absolutely ridiculous mayhem in a disease-ravaged version of New York. (We have a special weakness for the “Patsy” moves, which allow a disguised Mercer to point to an actual human and accuse them of being a monster—at which point the poor, hapless sap’s buddies will all open fire on them.) Sadly, Prototype 2 dials back the evil at least a bit—protagonist James Heller is a bit more heroic in his goals. If you want the Thing-esque fun to continue, maybe pivot over to 2020 indie title Carrion, which casts you as a rampaging, very hungry flesh blob, instead.

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You can do a lot of really awful things in pretty much every game of the post-apocalyptic Fallout series. (Want a free apartment in Fallout 3? Set off a nuke in the middle of a town on behalf of an aging white Republican type hoping to improve his views from his big, gaudy tower, and it’s yours!) But Fallout 2, from Black Isle Studios—former members of which are responsible for, like, half the games on this list, and who should maybe be on a watchlist somewhere—might take the cake. The thing about being bad in Fallout 2 is that it’s often so hideously, aggressively petty. Make a gangster play catch with a landmine. Tear a child’s doll apart limb-from-limb in front of him. Tell a flailing local mayor that you’ll only save his crappy little town if he chops off and cooks his finger. It’s true psychopath shit—while also being some of the funniest “I can’t believe they’re letting me do this” presentation for bad acts in all of gaming.

The thing about Bullfrog’s legendary Dungeon Keeper games is that you don’t actually do that many evil things while playing them. Sure, you can slap your minions—culled from the ranks of various fantasy bad guy armies, like orcs, giant spiders, and vampires—or make them fight for your own amusement. But it usually behooves you to be a pretty good boss, because it means your creatures will be more ready to wreak havoc on the heroes who make the mistake of intruding into your domain.

No, the real victory in Dungeon Keeper 1 and 2 comes from the presentation, with narrator Richard Ridings purring out paeans to your cunning evils every step of the way. With its fast-paced base-building and strategy gameplay, few bad-guy games have made villainy feel as delicious as Dungeon Keeper. Its spiritual successors over in the Evil Genius franchise can’t quite match that transcendent tone, but they’re still as close as modern gaming has come to hitting the pleasures of creating your own evil empire to rule the world with.

Okay, so, technically you’re playing a “good guy” in the second installment of this compulsively playable action spin on J.R.R. Tolkien canon. (At least, until things take a serious turn for the, uh, wraith-y, late in the narrative.) But the sheer amount of terror that former Ranger Talion and his ghost-elf buddy Celebrimbor can inflict on the orcs of Mordor (building, as it does, on the pants-wetting things you were able to do to mooks in Rocksteady’s Arkham series of Batman games) is some real “everybody is a villain to somebody” material. Especially once you start enslaving your own orc army, up to and including branding and “breaking” your soldiers to stop them from turning on you. No wonder your Nemeses keep talking about wanting to eat your bones!

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There’s no such thing as a “good” Grand Theft Auto protagonist; GTA IV’s Niko Bellic might talk about wanting to turn over a new leaf in cutscenes, but that doesn’t stop players from putting him in a taxi and doing a little pedestrian-smooshing sidewalk driving the very second the talking stops. GTA V embraces its players’ own worst impulses by making one of its three protagonists Trevor Philips, one of the rare Grand Theft Auto playable characters who’s as violently crazy as Grand Theft Auto players themselves. Playing as Trevor is license (as if you needed it) to treat Los Santos as your own personal playground, acknowledging that gleeful, explosive, and dynamic video game depravity is the main reason these games exist.

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Despite being set in one of the strangest offshoots of the Dungeons And Dragons cosmology, 1999’s Planescape: Torment doesn’t confine itself to high-concept fantasy evils. No, the coldest moments in Torment—centered on an amnesiac man who wakes up on a mortuary slab in a bizarre extradimensional city, only to find he’s now incapable of dying—are strictly human ones, regardless of the species of all involved. Does your teammate chafe under a life-debt made to a (now-unremembered) version of you from the past? Remind him of his servitude at every turn. Undermine the confidence of your so-called “friends,” the better to use them in battle. Manipulate the love of a woman who already died for you once, just to ensure that her ghost stays useful for your future goals. You don’t have to do any of these things. Torment is a game about choices, and regrets—and it’s very willing to let its players make more of both.

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We actually debated for a bit about which of Toby Fox’s games would take this spot—because his more current work, pseudo-sequel Deltarune, hides some of the most uncomfortable material we’ve ever encountered in an ostensibly kid-focused video game. But it’s hard to beat a classic, and Undertale’s “bad” route has quickly become a classic of doing wrong in video games. As the game’s own motto asserts, you can get through Undertale without killing a single one of the goofy monsters that accost you on your trip through an underground kingdom, sparing each one in turn. But you for sure can. And then keep killing them. And then kill them some more, until each region of the game’s world becomes completely devoid of life, an empty wasteland where funny creatures used to laugh and play. The world will try to stop you. Your former friends from your previous runs through the game will beg and chastise you. The game itself will punish you mercilessly if you actually manage to follow through. But what are those things, except roadblocks, in the face of true Determination?

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In many of the games on this list, you play as massively powerful figures: Super-powered individuals, weapon-bedecked sociopaths, etc. ZA/UM’s Disco Elysium isn’t like that. Your playable character (an amnesiac detective, one of several ways the game pays tribute to Planescape: Torment) can’t do much in the way of physical harm; he doesn’t even have his sidearm for most of the game’s duration. But depending on your choices, he can give himself over to a thousand “smaller” evils that cause just as much pain, if not more, to the people around him: Casual racist comments, momentary instances of police brutality, the impulse to treat both his own body, and the lives of people around him, like objects to be used. There are lots of games, including a whole bunch of ones that wouldn’t fit on this list, that let you do over-the-top and monstrous actions to other people. But very few of them let you be evil in the ways that are accessible to everybody, the basic evils of human existence that people are always trying to fend off. Or, to put it another way: Lots of games let you shoot people. Very few let you call your barely remembered ex on the phone to scream at her about all the ways she’s hurt you, both of you sobbing as your awful, ugly choices tear you both apart. The difference between those two approaches is the one between melodrama and masterpiece—and Disco Elysium falls firmly on the latter side.

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