I can’t post in the main sub, I’m hoping someone can help a sista out. I’m talking about games that make us actually be the villains, I don’t want games like BG3 recommended to me, although you can have a bad ending in that game I just want games that let us play bad people without it feeling a bit forced or out of place. It doesn’t matter what genre, don’t suggest gta though i obviously know that one.
Listing obvious ones first - Dungeon Keeper and Overlord series
Evil Genius if you want a 70s spy film themed Dungeon Keeper
Maybe Tyranny ?
Tyranny is the best example of a game with a villain protagonist.
There's no "good" choices, just different brands of evil.
carrion maybe??
Carrion. You are a... thing, that eats people and destroys shit.
Life Eater. You play as a serial killer/kidnapper who works for a mysterious maybe-just-hallucination Eldritch Horror. MC is not pure evil, but he does stalk strangers so he can kidnap them and ritualistically sacrifice them so... yeah. Villain.
Plague Inc. I mean, you play as an humanity wiping plague. Pretty villainous, imo.
Slayaway Camp. It's a puzzle game, but it has you be a Slasher Horror Movie villain killing peiple at summer camp.
Maneater. Really fun game where you play a very pissed off shark on a quest for revenge against a few humans. And sure, that's righteous and what not but you are eating a lot more than just the few dudes who hurt you... and also causing an ecological disaster, sering how many animals you gotta eat lol
Untitled Goose Game. What is more villainous than a goddamn goose? A goose who woke up and choose violence Be gé*, do crimes! *Gé (pronounced gay) means 'goose' in Irish.
Stubbs the Zombie in Rebel without a Pulse. You play Stubbs, a zombie and you do, well, zombie things.
Spec Ops: The Line. Technically, all military shooters have you play the bad guy but Spec Ops is a bit more on the nose with that.
Hitman. Yes, Agent 47 is the lesser evil. He still is a hitman who murders people, so not exactly a hero. Maybe not a villain either? But he does get paid for it, so it ain't like he does it anti-hero style either.
Undertale. You can technically choose whether to be the antichrist or not, but that's because you, the player, have chosen to do so. By default, though, Frisk has 0 issues killing everything on their path.
Serial Cleaner. Another more puzzle-like game. You play a dude who gets paid to clean up crime scenes... for the mafia. You gotta stealth around, clean up and destroy all evidence, and leave without leaving a single trace. Has a sequel, Serial Cleaners, but imo the first one is the best of the two.
Out of curiosity, do any Hitman games have you kill purely good targets? Or even decent but flawed people? Obviously you can murder anyone you want, but I’m talking about targets assigned by the game.
Legacy of Kain Blood Omen. You're playing as a stuck up nobel who's been assassinated and offered a faustian bargain to return to life as a vampire to reap his revenge. Kain's evil internal monologs are superb and he is truly a monster
Infamous technically. You can be good or evil but it never felt out of place to be bad imo
Undertale, Fallout New Vegas are the first that come to mind
This answer is a bit tongue-in-cheek, as those games don’t make you feel like a villain.
Grand strategy games, like Victoria 3 and Crusader Kings. Amounts of colonization, exploitation and wars you do for profit is insane, if you think about it. And you can add to them all the incest and assassinations in CK.
Factorio — you are destroying forests, use all resources, generate a lot of pollution and kill natives who are trying to defend their planet.
A bit more serious answers — maneater where you play as a shark, Overlord, Dungeon Keeper.
Add Rimworld onto that list, maybe.
It's possible to play a nice colony, but the game is a lot more weighted towards being an awful person than most games that technically have a "bad" option but really expect a good ending.
postal franchise more or less and. fucken hatred i guess but its not as fun as postal
Prototype.
in WOTR you can be an Evil-all-eating-swarm. Pure evil.
KOTOR 1 and 2 have amazing dark side paths, but it also allows you to be light side so I'm not sure if that qualifies given your odd stipulation
The dark side campaign in KOTOR is intense. I felt so unclean after finishing it that I immediately started a light side campaign. Which is much less interesting but doesn't blacken your soul.
What you can do to Mission Vao has to be one of the most fucked up things in a game.
It does feature a great exchange: "you are the Dark lord of the Sith." "You have learned your final lesson, apprentice."
KOTOR 2, sadly, wasn't nearly as intense, since they rushed to get it out.
In Hatred you play as a mass shooter.
All GTAs you play as bad people doing bad things.
In Vampyr you play as a Vampire Doctor, you can do good but you also have to feed. Feeding makes you more powerful and the game easier.
In Cult of the Lamb you brainwash and sacrifice followers to make you a living god.
Just a few from the top of my head.
Overlord - Evil Pikmin sort of
Dungeon Keeper - old series that sees you play as a the Dungeon keeper raising an evil army and defending against plundering heroes - It's an RTS really. A few modern ones call Dungeons and War for the Overworld.
Somewhat Drakenguard 3
Evil Genius and it's sequel - if you want RTS / strategy but with a James Bond / pulp spy theme.
Ghost Master - though this is debatable as sometimes you're freeing trapped souls and revealing awful family secrets etc but then you are causing a lot of trauma to people pretty much.
Helldivers 1 and 2 though with 1 at least you have to be in it for the longer haul to beat each of the races.
Power Mad - oddly an old I think it was meant to be shoveware game that came out many years back on CD - you play a world leader based on leads of the time e.g. Phony Blair, Saddam Insane, Osma Bin-Lama. Your goal, be the last nation stating by trying to put away everyone else's citizens or kill them. It's oddly somewhat tactical as you can convert citizens into scientists, Hippies or Troops. Troops let you attack others cities to reduce the number of people there, Scientists let you develop nukes (It takes a good few lab accidents costing Scientists lives to make a nuke), Hippies can be made into peace circles. You can use propaganda to make people leave for a country for yours, you can attack them directly, you can nuke them causing massive damage BUT the nuke has a counter which I specifically didn't mention what it does, the peace circles. You see you can stop a nuke by launching a hippy peace circle at it so it hits them and explodes mostly harmlessly away from your cities.
This Is the President - you got to power, now you need to make sure people don't find out how. lie, cheat, steal, extort to escape justice and cover up your team members own little moral failings and unfortunate habits to help keep them on side and on message.
Slayaway camp - A puzzle game where you play slasher called Skullface and others linked to him attacking people initially a Summer camp but them more areas too.
Naughty Bear - Manhunt with teddy bears pretty much.
Unholy Heights - You're the Devil, you're also the Landlord of a block of flats. Rent them out to wondering monster to fight for you and defend you against those who aren't too happy with The Devil having set up near their town.
Monster Train 1 and 2 - Heaven won the war but a few embers of the infernal still remain, you have one and a train and a couple of clans of monsters, time to fight back against heaven. - a rogue Lite Deckbuilder.
Bleed - The heroes of old are still worshipped while they fester away thy are no heroes, they are not worthy of people adoring them, you should be the hero the world needs now, time to show the world you're the ultimate hero and show the world what twisted abominations their current heroes have become by finding and killing them. - A shoot em up
Helldivers series, first one a little more than the second, but in the second you are still soldiers for the worst of four evils in the setting.
Entropy zero and Entropy zero 2, both are half-life mods where you play as a Combine Cop and Elite respectively (2 is better in every way imo, you can just start with that one).
Are the other factions even evil? From my understanding, the bugs are just animals that Super Earth keeps trying to exploit for energy and the other two are fighting because Super Earth is actively trying to genocide them.
In GW1 Super Earth is undoubtably the only evil one, each other faction only acting in self defence against Super Earth’s unjust attacks.
But in GW2 the other factions have stooped closer to Super Earth’s level, employing slavery and civilian torture to progress themselves, but Super Earth is still the worst of the lot. any atrocity the other factions commit, they got the idea off Super Earth doing it to them or it’s own citizens.
Also bugs are around human level intelligence broadly, that fact was covered up after it was discovered they make good fuel, their minds are just structured really differently, but they would likely qualify as people and not animals.
Damn, I didn’t realize that about the bugs. I thought Super Earth was “only” repeatedly fucking up containment, getting people killed, sending massive numbers of troops to avoidable deaths, then lying about it so they could keep doing it.
I don’t play, but Helldivers has some fantastic lore.
Originally they were a controlled opposition, but Super Earth very quickly lost control lol
Infamous and Dark Forces Jedi Knight definitely gave you options to be evil. Many of the Warcraft 3 campaigns too.
I'm not sure what you are refering to, so games that focus on you being evil all the way through? In all owlcat games you can be terrible and choose your aligment from pretty much the start but idk if you would consider that forced.
Well when I played bg3 with a friend the “evil” thing I’ve done was ignore shadow heart, be mean to a kid and open a shed that a troll or something was hiding in to do some freaky stuff, of course I didn’t want to kill shart or the kid but that felt kinda lame.
and I didn’t like BG3 anyways so I didn’t play all the way through which may have been unfair of me to say but I don’t take it back it. And also I did say I didn’t want “games like bg3 to be recommended to me” meaning any like top down game, or strategy games. But if that’s truly where these games are I guess I could make an exception. Except for BG3 though lol
Fable
Tyranny is the big one. Made by obsidian, you play as the Herald of a classic big evil empire, entering the lands of the last resistance to the empire. Highly recommended
God of War Greek saga.
Castlevania Lords of Shadows 2.
Stubbs The Zombie is a pretty fun one. I believe it just got a remake/remaster too.
Evil Genius and Evil Genius 2.
Tropico is a sim city type game where you can play as a dictator
Seconding Tyranny. And then WH40K Rogue Trader also makes it really easy for you to be evil. You almost can’t stop but making at least some people’s lives miserable. There are also different paths to fuck with different groups of people.
Call of Duty