50 Games Where You Play The Bad Guy

The days of being the hero in video games are long behind us. More and more games have cottoned on to the fact that gamers have a dark side. Any good game over the past 20 years has shown that a large population of video game players like to blow off steam in the digital world, be it killing hordes of indigenous people or simply raising taxes to an unsustainable level. So kick back inside your hollowed out volcano and stroke your evil pet, as we take a look at 30 games in which you play the bad guy.

1. Jackie Estacado | Darkness 2

Jackie Estacado has become the don of the Franchetti crime family and whilst he has control of the Darkness inside, an explosion forces him to give into it once more and go on a multitude of killing sprees.

2. Vito Scaletta | Mafia 2

Vito Scaletta is the protagonist of Mafia II. He is an up-and-coming gangster in the Empire Bay criminal underworld who became a made member of the Falcone Crime Family… His aim; to become the biggest, baddest wise guy in the world.

3. The Overlord | Overlord

In Overlord you take the role of a resurrected warrior known simply as The Overlord, who has control over hordes of gremlin-like creatures known as “minions”. The player must defeat seven corrupt ruling heroes by being evil or really evil.

4. El Presidente | Tropico

Tropico sees the player taking the role of “El Presidente”, the ruler of an island in the Caribbean, during the Cold War era from the 1950s onward. The game is tongue-in-cheek in its presentation of semi-democratic banana republics, using a great deal of humour, while still referencing such topics as totalitarianism, electoral fraud, and the interventions of powerful companies.

5. Mario and Luigi: Bowser’s Inside Story

When the Mushroom Kingdom is taken over by the evil mad scientist ‘Fawful’. Bowser unkowningly inhales the Mario and the gang and subsequently has to save the World.

6. GoldenEye: Rogue Agent

The player takes the role of an ex-MI6 agent, and killer of 007, who is recruited by Auric Goldfinger to assassinate his rival Dr. No. Whilst the game is set within the James Bond universe, the game is only called GoldenEye due to the fact that the agent has a golden ‘cybernetic’ eye.

7. Kratos – God of War

In a nutshell, Kratos became a God after years of loyal service and subsequently tries to take over Greece. Other Gods try to stop him and he turns against them. He then joins the Titans, who want to overthrow the Gods. The story actually goes much deeper and to be honest, the gods had it coming but you are still angry as hell and out for vengeance.

8. Wario Land: Super Mario Land 2

Wario wants a castle of his own and is happy to steal it from the Syrup Pirates, blow up anything that stands in his way and use a money grabbing genie to achieve his dreams.

9. GTA

Although the more recent outings have tried to weave a twisting and conflicting narrative into the games, you essentially play a highly skilled car jacker looking to commit crimes to get money. That’s pretty bad…

10. Saints Row

The Saints Row series is rife with corruption and evil deeds. The original game saw the player inducted into the gang known as the 3rd Street Saints. During the course of the game, you partake in numerous crimes culminating in a dead mayor and police chief. You are subsequently blown up on a luxury yacht… and survive…

11. Dungeon Keeper

In Dungeon Keeper, you are tasked with building and managing a dank and dirty dungeon, protecting it from invading ‘hero’ characters intent on stealing accumulated treasures, killing monsters, and ultimately the player’s demise. The ultimate goal is to conquer the world by destroying the heroic forces and rival dungeon keepers in each realm.

12. Evil Genius

Similar to Dungeon Keeper, in Evil Genius, players act as a villainous force attempting to achieve global domination, whilst fending off the forces of justice; to this end the gameplay is split between management of a base and the completion of “acts of infamy” in the rest of the world.

13. Heather from Silent Hill 3

Heather Mason is the protagonist of Silent Hill 3. Heather is the reincarnation of both Cheryl Mason and Alessa Gillespie and is on a mission to get revenge and kill God. Pretty badass…

14. Twisted Metal

The Twisted Metal series generally revolves around the eponymous “Twisted Metal” content. A vehicular combat tournament hosted once a year. The aim is to destroy all the competition no matter what using both demolition derby style driving and projectile weaponry.  The winner gets their one wish granted by the host “Calypso”. But be careful what you wish for.

15. Manhunt

As a death row inmate you are pretty limited for choices, but when a mysterious man know as The Director replaces your lethal injection with a sedative in return for your help, you are inclined to agree. Sadly, what you agree to is to work your way across the city and maim and murder a series of gangs. The Director also kills your family for good measure.

16. Prototype

Being a powerful yet amnesiac shapeshifter isn’t all bad. You can tear around the city killing anyone you see fit. Through most of Prototype you think you are the good guy doing good deeds, but ultimately you are responsible for unleashing a virus on the city and before you lost your memory you worked for the enemy and stole a deadly biological weapon as ‘insurance’ before being gunned down and subsequently becoming a superhuman monster.

17. Max McMann from Devils Attorney

At first glance, Devil’s Attorney might seem like a shameless Phoenix Wright clone. You do play a defense attorney embroiled in a courtroom drama, but unlike the naïve and justice-driven Phoenix, Max McMann is the eponymous devil’s attorney. His clients did the crime, and they pay him the big bucks to avoid doing the time.

18. Knights of the old republic

KOTOR allows you to carve your own path within the Star Wars universe. Should you choose to shed the do-good side of the game, then you can choose the path of the dark side and aim to stand before the remaining Sith forces as the new Dark Lord of the Sith. Choose the path of anger, hate and suffering and soon you will know the true power of the dark side.

19. M. Bison – Street Fighter Games

This would-be world dictator and megalomaniac rules the fictional Far East country of Mriganka with an iron fist. His ultimate ambition is to control the world’s governments through his covert crime syndicate, Shadaloo. Bison tends to host the Street Fighter competition and should you choose to play as him you can vanquish all those who hold vendettas against you.

20. Heavy Rain

Without spoiling the ending you play as various different characters all suspected as being the infamous ‘Origami Killer’. As you play through the game blacking out and getting vital information via flashback you learn the true motives of your actions.

21. Killzone

In this 24th Century sci-fi Shooter there are two factions the ISA and the Helgast. The Helgast look like space nazi’s and show no mercy throughout the campaigns. However, it turns out that the Helghast are actually the good guys. The Helghast were on both planet Helghan and Vekta first. It turns out that the ISA are evil invaders who invaded HELGHAN  and VEKTA over a dispute about trade tax imposed by the Helghast. Eventually, the ISA used chemical weapons on the Helghan forcing them to live in gas masks like that.

22. Braid

When you spend an entire game chasing a Princess to ‘save her’ you eventually have to ask yourself why she keeps running. At the end of Braid, the answer becomes all to clear when the protagonist Tim is revealed to be the evil Monster that the Princess is setting the traps for… Mind blown!

23. Plague

Your pathogen has just infected ‘Patient Zero’. Now you must bring about the end of human history by evolving a deadly, global Plague whilst adapting against everything humanity can do to defend itself. You evil germ!

24. Soul Reaver

Destiny can be a b*tch and being stuck in a endless time loop where you follow the advice of others only to find out that it is your own soul stuck in the sword given to you in the beginning is a total head mash, no wonder he kills fellow vampires and absorbs their souls.

25. Golden Sun

In this Gameboy RPG you play Issac and his team and chase Saturos and Menardi across the world attempting to stop them from lighting a number of light houses… Lucky you fail as in the second game it explains that despite Saturos and Menardi being complete ‘gits’ they were actually the heroes.

26. Uncharted

Nathan Drake is presented as a sympathetic and charming character – a modern day Indiana Jones. However, during the course of each title, he kills hundreds of men, perhaps even thousands. He shows no remorse, is completely materialistic and hides his psychopathic behaviour behind jokes…

27. Shadow of the Colossus

In Shadow of the Colossus, you play Wander on a mission to return the soul back to a young girls body. The ethereal voice of Dormin offers you her soul in return for slaying 16 closossi. Despite being warned by Dormin that he may have to pay a great price to revive Mono, you work your way through them all only to discover that the death of each turns you into Dormin, an ancient evil.

28. Half Life – Opposing Force

There are so many sides in Opposing Force it’s hard to know who is good and who is bad. You play Adrian Shephard, a US marine sent into neutralise the Alien threat releases by Gordon Freeman in the first Half Life game. During the game you will disarm a nuke designed to kill the incoming alien horde, as well kill soldiers from Black Operations. You’ll even chase Gordon himself

29. Stalker

Set in a post-nuclear Chernobyl, you really are your own worst enemy as you start the game without any memories, a Stalker tattoo and an order to kill Strelok. You work your way through mutants, soldiers and generals only to find out that you are Strelok. In a classic ‘don’t shoot the messenger’ routine you then aim to kill the A.I that brainwashed you that was also working on a solution to world peace. You bad man!

30. Eternal Darkness

The days of being the square-jawed hero are long behind us. More and more games have cottoned on to the fact that players have a dark side — and that there is something genuinely compelling about seeing the world from the other side of the moral equation. Whether you are building a supervillain lair, wiping out humanity as a sentient plague, or simply playing an outlaw so thoroughly rotten that your own gang turns on you, these games let you lean into it fully. We started this list back in 2014 with 30 entries. A decade of genuinely brilliant villain games later, we have extended it to 50. The original 30 are below, followed by 20 more that have arrived — or that we missed — since then.

The original 3020 more since 2014Honourable mentionsFAQ

20 more games where you play the bad guy — added 2026

A decade is a long time in gaming. Since the original list went live in 2014, developers have gotten significantly more ambitious — and more inventive — about putting players in the villain’s seat. These twenty entries either arrived after 2014 or were inexcusable omissions from the original list. On that note, it’s worth a read: female representation in gaming.

31. Tyranny (2016)

Most RPGs cast you as the hero who defeats the dark lord. Tyranny starts after the dark lord has already won. You play as a Fatebinder — an arbiter of the law serving the evil overlord Kyros — sent to bring order to a recently conquered territory. The twist is that you have genuine agency in how that evil is administered. You can be a pragmatic enforcer, a sadistic tyrant, or someone quietly subverting the system from within. Obsidian’s writing is exceptional throughout, and the game forces you to confront what complicity in evil actually looks like. One of the most underrated RPGs of its generation.

32. Carrion (2020)

No moral ambiguity here. In Carrion you play as a writhing, tentacled biological horror that has escaped containment in a research facility, and your singular purpose is to consume every human being in the building. There are no cutscenes justifying your actions, no backstory explaining why you deserve sympathy — you are just a monster, and the humans are terrified prey. It is enormously satisfying and one of the purest expressions of villain gameplay ever made. The pixel art is gorgeous in a deeply unsettling way.

33. Undertale — Genocide Route (2015)

Undertale’s default experience is warm, witty, and deliberately subversive of RPG conventions. The Genocide Route is the opposite. By choosing to kill every single monster in each area — hunting down enemies until none remain, eliminating characters you spent hours befriending — you systematically dismantle everything the game built. The game knows what you are doing and reacts accordingly. Characters who were warm and funny become despairing. The music changes. Undertale’s Genocide Route is one of gaming’s most genuinely uncomfortable experiences precisely because you chose it.

34. Disco Elysium (2019)

You play as a detective who wakes up with no memory, in a city falling apart, having drunk and drug-binged himself into near oblivion. Disco Elysium does not force you to be evil — but it absolutely lets you be. The corrupt cop path, the fascist ideologue path, or simply the path of a man so consumed by self-destruction that he ruins every relationship around him are all fully written and fully playable. The writing is among the best in any game ever made, and the game never flinches from letting your character be genuinely awful.

35. Vampyr (2018)

Dr Jonathan Reid is a physician who becomes a vampire in 1918 London and must choose how to feed. The city is divided into districts, each populated with NPCs who have their own lives, relationships, and health conditions. Feeding on them — killing them — powers you up significantly. Feeding on key characters weakens entire districts, eventually causing them to collapse. If you feed on enough people aggressively, London itself begins to deteriorate around you. Vampyr is at its most interesting when you lean into the monster, watching the consequences of your hunger ripple outward through the city.

36. Plague Inc: Evolved (2016)

You are a pathogen. Your goal is to infect and kill every human being on Earth before they develop a cure. Plague Inc: Evolved distils the villain fantasy to its most abstract and strategic form — you are not a character, you are a force of extinction. The game is grimly compelling, particularly when you start adapting your disease to counter human countermeasures: making it more resistant, more transmissible, more lethal at precisely the right moment. Morbidly fascinating and oddly educational about how pandemics actually develop.

37. Hitman: World of Assassination (2021)

Agent 47 is a professional contract killer with no ideology and no remorse. He will eliminate any target, in any location, for the right client. The Hitman series has always been on this list in spirit but the World of Assassination trilogy, completed in 2021, represents the definitive version — a globe-trotting assassination sandbox where the creativity of your kills is the point. The game never pretends 47 is a good person. He is a weapon, and you are the one pointing him.

38. Spec Ops: The Line (2012)

This one deserves its place despite its age because it was criminally overlooked in the original list and is arguably the most important villain game ever made. Spec Ops: The Line presents itself as a straightforward military shooter — and then, over the course of its campaign, reveals that you, the player, are responsible for a series of atrocities you committed while believing you were the hero. The white phosphorus sequence remains one of gaming’s most confronting moments. By the end, the game has made a compelling case that the shooter genre itself trains players to be bad guys without realising it.

39. Baldur’s Gate 3 — Dark Urge Origin (2023)

Baldur’s Gate 3 is an extraordinary RPG in any playthrough, but the Dark Urge origin is specifically designed for players who want to explore genuine darkness. Your character begins the game with a compulsion toward violence and murder that conflicts with any attempt at a conventional heroic path. You can resist the urges — or you can embrace them, and the game has written out the full consequences of doing so in extraordinary detail. The Dark Urge is arguably the best-written villain origin in RPG history, and Larian clearly put enormous care into making the evil path as compelling as the heroic one.

40. Red Dead Redemption 2 — Full Dishonour (2018)

RDR2 is designed around a story of redemption, but the systems underneath support a completely different playthrough. A fully dishonourable Arthur Morgan is one of gaming’s most compelling villain experiences — not because the game rewards it, but because it does not. The world reacts to you with fear and contempt. Strangers cross the street. Your gang begins to distrust you. The epilogue hits differently. Rockstar built a game that works hard to make you feel the weight of moral choices, and playing it as a villain makes those systems visible in a way the heroic path never does.

41. Evil Genius 2: World Domination (2021)

Build a hollowed-out volcano lair. Recruit henchmen. Construct deathtraps for incompetent spies. Pursue world domination through a series of increasingly absurd global schemes. Evil Genius 2 is pure camp villain fantasy — gleefully silly, endlessly entertaining, and stuffed with loving references to the Bond villain aesthetic. The management mechanics underneath are more robust than they appear, and the game is far more replayable than the original thanks to multiple genius characters with distinct playstyles. Essential for anyone who has ever wanted to stroke a cat while explaining their plan to a captive audience.

42. Dungeon Keeper (1997) — A Classic That Demands Inclusion

A glaring omission from the 2014 list. Peter Molyneux’s Dungeon Keeper was the original villain management game — you build the dungeon, lay the traps, recruit the monsters, and repel the insufferably heroic adventurers who keep trying to loot it. The dark humour is pitch perfect and the game invented a template that Evil Genius, Overlord, and a dozen others have since borrowed from. The phrase “you must keeper” belongs in gaming’s hall of fame. If you have not played it, the original is available on GOG.

43. Fable Anniversary (2014)

The original Fable’s evil path was one of the first mainstream examples of a game that visibly transformed your character based on moral choices — go full evil and your character grows horns, their skin pales, and villagers flee at their approach. Fable Anniversary brought the original game to modern platforms with updated visuals, making the evil playthrough more accessible than ever. It lacks the depth of more modern morality systems but the sheer visible commitment of the transformation — and the NPC reactions to a fully corrupted hero — remain satisfying.

44. Sifu (2022)

Sifu presents itself as a revenge story — your character hunts down the assassins who killed your family. But as the game progresses and the body count climbs, the framing quietly shifts. Your character ages with every death, becoming more ruthless and less recognisably human. By the game’s final stages you are no longer a grieving child seeking justice — you are a relentless killing machine who has sacrificed everything, including their own humanity, in pursuit of vengeance. The game’s secret ending makes this explicit. Sifu is a brilliant villain origin story wearing martial arts game clothes.

45. Deathloop (2021)

Colt Vahn wakes on an island trapped in a time loop, hunted by everyone he meets, with one goal: kill eight people before midnight to break the cycle. Deathloop is built around the premise of murdering the same people repeatedly — learning their routines, finding their vulnerabilities, and executing them with increasing efficiency. The targets are horrible people (they voted to trap everyone in the loop for their own pleasure), which provides some moral cover — but the game’s real pleasure is in becoming a perfectly calibrated killing machine. Arkane at their stylish, creative best.

46. Postal 2 (2003) — The Extreme End

Postal 2 belongs on this list as the most deliberately transgressive entry. It is not a good game in any conventional sense, but it is committed to its premise: you play The Postal Dude, a man running errands in a small American town, and the game gives you the option to complete those errands entirely peacefully — or to simply kill everyone you encounter. The violence is extreme and deliberately offensive. It exists at the furthest end of the villain game spectrum, and its inclusion here is for completeness rather than recommendation. Know what you are getting into.

47. Black & White (2001) — Another Classic Omission

Lionhead’s god game gave you direct control over a deity and a giant creature companion, and let you choose whether to be worshipped through kindness or feared through power. The evil path in Black & White is genuinely compelling — starve your followers, use your creature as a weapon, burn enemy villages. The villagers’ reactions to an evil god were remarkably expressive for the time. Like Dungeon Keeper, its absence from the original 2014 list was an oversight worth correcting.

48. Bully (2006) — Also Overlooked in 2014

Rockstar’s school-set adventure features Jimmy Hopkins, a troubled teen navigating the social hierarchy of Bullworth Academy by, among other things, bullying, pranking, and generally terrorising his fellow students. Bully occupies an interesting moral middle ground — Jimmy is often acting against worse bullies — but the game absolutely supports playing him as a genuine antagonist. A cult classic that deserved better than to slip through the original list.

49. Suzerain (2020)

A text-heavy political RPG in which you play Anton Rayne, the newly elected president of a fictional nation, making policy decisions that determine whether you lead your country toward democracy or authoritarian rule. Suzerain’s villain path — consolidating power, suspending rights, eliminating opponents — is remarkable for how mundane and bureaucratic it makes evil feel. No one announces that they are becoming a dictator. The slide happens through a series of individually justifiable decisions. One of the most intelligent explorations of political evil in gaming.

50. Manhunt (2003) — Rockstar’s Darkest Game

James Earl Cash is a death row inmate forced to participate in a snuff film directed by a deranged producer. Manhunt is Rockstar’s most controversial game — a stealth title built entirely around executing enemies in increasingly brutal ways, with the camera lingering on each kill for the director’s approval. There is no heroism here, no redemption, and no moral framework that absolves the player. It is genuinely dark, frequently uncomfortable, and absolutely belongs on any list of games that put you fully in the villain’s shoes. Not for the faint-hearted.

Honourable mentions

A few more that nearly made the cut: Cyberpunk 2077 supports a ruthlessly violent, entirely mercenary playthrough with meaningful narrative consequences; Sleeping Dogs puts you so deep undercover in a Triad that the line between cop and criminal dissolves; This War of Mine forces you into moral compromises that make you question what villainy actually means; and Stellaris lets you designate entire sentient species as livestock, which may be the most quietly evil thing on this entire list.

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