8 Open-World Games Where You’re Actually the Bad Guy

2 weeks ago 6

Daniel has been playing games for entirely too many years, with his Steam library currently numbering nearly 750 games and counting. When he's not working or watching anime, he's either playing or thinking about games, constantly on the lookout for fascinating new gameplay styles and stories to experience. Daniel has previously written lists for TheGamer, as well as guides for GamerJournalist, and he currently covers tech topics on SlashGear.

Intertwining a large-scale open world with a complex narrative is a bit of a tricky prospect, especially if you’re hoping to pull some kind of fake-out near the end regarding your protagonist’s alliances. If you’re going on some kind of big adventure, nine times out of ten, it’ll be for a just cause, or at least a good reason. Bad guys don’t go on journeys, after all, they let the good guys come to them.

9 Best Games Where the Bad Guys Win

Dead or alive, they got what they wanted in the end.

All that said, the prospect isn’t impossible. Some open-world games have managed to spring a fake-out on you, either midway through the story or near the end, revealing that your protagonist wasn’t the hero you thought they were. Maybe they were secretly a part of the antagonistic faction, maybe their adventure began under false or misinformed pretenses, or maybe their presence in this open world was what drove it into chaos in the first place. Even if you have the option to take things in a heroic direction when all’s said and done, it’s still a fact that you had at least some hand in everything going sideways, and your big adventure only made it worse.

Spoilers ahead!

8 Crackdown

A Police State Field Test

In Crackdown, you play as a superhuman Agent for the mysterious Agency, all as a part of a renewed effort to aid Pacific City’s police force against a trio of crime organizations that seem to be steadily rising in power. While deploying super-soldiers against organized crime seems a little disproportionate, the police certainly can’t handle things themselves, so there’s really no other recourse.

However, at the very end of the game, once all three gangs have been successfully subdued and the city left virtually crime-free, your enigmatic Director decides to lay all the cards on the table. The Volk, Los Muertos, and the Shai-Gen were all dangerous organizations, and they were threatening the general populace… but only because the Agency secretly funneled funds and resources into all three of them.

See, the Agency has designs on the rest of the world, and they figured the best way to get their foot in the door would be to covertly create an existential threat, then take all the credit for cleaning it up. Basically, you just proved the scientific efficacy of a city-wide police state, and the Agency is now good to take the operation on the road.

7 Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic

The Dark Side is Always Tempting

Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic Darth Malak

Anyone with even a passing familiarity with Star Wars knows about the endless war between the Jedi and the Sith, the Light and Dark sides of the Force. This, of course, is why Light and Dark alignment is a major component of character growth in Knights of the Old Republic. As you learn midway through the game, though, you didn’t actually start this little adventure of yours as a truly neutral individual.

Your custom protagonist is not just some random nobody who was bumming around in space. You are, in fact, the Sith Lord Darth Revan, a fact revealed to you the first time you encounter the game’s other major Sith Lord, Darth Malak. An indeterminate period ago, you and Malak were members of the Jedi Order, but after a stint as soldiers in the Mandalorian Wars, you went all Sith and tried to conquer the galaxy. Following a big conflict, you were captured by the Council and had your memory wiped.

At this point, whether you stick to the Light side or hop off the wagon back to the Dark side is up to you. It is a fact, though, that this little slice of the galaxy wouldn’t be under such concentrated attack if you and your buddy Malak hadn’t sparked things off.

6 Far Cry 4

Way to Destabilize a Country, Hero

At the beginning of Far Cry 4, our protagonist Ajay is on his way to Kyrat to return his late mother’s ashes. In transit, he is abducted by the king of Kyrat, Pagan Min, and brought to a mansion for a dinner party. When Pagan leaves for a moment, Ajay is freed by the rebellion organization, the Golden Path, and begins a concentrated effort to dismantle Pagan’s rule.

However, in the game’s climax, assuming Ajay doesn’t shoot Pagan at the first opportunity, he reveals that he actually knew Ajay’s mother, and the whole reason he brought Ajay to the mansion was to help him return her ashes. In fact, if you just sit and wait for a while at the start of the game instead of trying to escape, Pagan just lets you do it right then and there.

Open World Stealth Games Assassin's Creed 3 Thief Deus Ex Mankind Divided Ghost of Tsushima

10 Best Open World Stealth Games

Explore the world from the shadows.

By going on his massive rampage to dismantle Pagan’s rule, Ajay severely destabilizes Kyrat, effectively for nothing. As an extra insult to injury, depending on which member of the Golden Path Ajay puts in charge, the country either becomes an extremist theocracy or an authoritarian drug state. You can kill the leader of the Golden Path you put in charge as well, if it makes you happy, but it doesn’t really fix what you already broke.

5 Shadow of the Colossus

They Were Literally Just Standing There

In Shadow of the Colossus, our quiet hero Wander ventures into the Forbidden Lands via the Shrine of Worship in the hopes of bringing a girl named Mono back to life. Within the shrine, Wander is contacted by a disembodied voice named Dormin, who offers to do the deed, but only if Wander slays the sixteen colossi wandering the Forbidden Lands. Bit of a sketchy deal, but hey, surely slaying giant monsters is a net positive for the world, right? Right?

Well, not quite. Firstly, giant as they are, the colossi are just minding their own business, sitting in place or wandering around aimlessly. They weren’t hurting anyone or menacing anything, they were literally just standing there, and you decided to murder them in cold blood.

Secondly, and more importantly, once Wander slays all the colossi, Dormin does keep their word and revive Mono, but they also possess Wander’s body and transform him into a giant, horrifying demon. Dormin was sealed up by the essence of the colossi for a good reason, and you almost let them loose to menace the world once more. Frankly, we should all be glad Wander ended up getting atomized by a giant whirlwind of light.

4 Prototype

Not Your Face, Not Your Life

At the beginning of Prototype, Alex Mercer awakens on a morgue slab with a bad case of amnesia and a lot of gross tendrils popping out of his body. He swiftly discovers a major government conspiracy, particularly revolving around the bioengineered Blacklight virus ravaging the city. Assuming he has been experimented upon, Alex sets off in search of answers and justice.

However, Alex’s assumption was a bit flawed from the start. “Alex Mercer” is, in fact, not Alex Mercer at all. The real Alex Mercer, a former Blackwatch researcher, deliberately released a sample of Blacklight just as he was gunned down by soldiers. The virus consumed his body and absorbed his memories; our Alex is effectively just a walking mass of viral gunk who thinks he’s human. You are simultaneously the individual who caused the Blacklight outbreak in Manhattan and the Blacklight virus itself. Two bad guys for the price of one!

The end of the game makes things a little ambiguous with “Alex’s” feelings about his relative humanity, but by the time Prototype 2 rolls around, he’s completely abandoned all pretenses of being human and gleefully plunges the world into viral chaos.

3 Prey (2017)

Empathy, Empathy, Put Yourself in Place of Me

At the beginning of the 2017 Prey, Morgan Yu is subjected to a series of weird tests by TranStar researchers, when a sudden Typhon Mimic attack throws everything into chaos and reveals they’ve been living in a fake apartment for about three years. That’s certainly strange, but immaterial in the face of the pressing circumstances: you’re aboard the Talos I space station, which is currently overrun with Typhon.

A backup of Morgan’s past self tells them they need to destroy the station in order to kill the Typhon and destroy TranStar’s research on them, though their brother Alex proposes an alternative means of destroying the Typhon without damaging the station. Whichever route you choose, it actually doesn’t matter, because none of this was real.

You aren’t Morgan Yu, but rather, you’re a Typhon yourself, implanted with the real Morgan’s memories. See, Typhon don’t have mirror neurons and can’t experience empathy, so humanity can’t reason with the Typhon that are currently attacking Earth. The point of this experiment was to teach you these feelings, and if you made altruistic choices throughout the game, things will end on a happy note. If you didn’t, Alex will just shoot you dead. Even if you did, you can also opt to just forgo your simulated humanity and murder him then and there.

2 Dredge

Should’ve Thrown It Back

The protagonist of Dredge is an unnamed fisherman who drifts into the Marrows after a stormy night dashes his ship on a cliff. Not long after taking up a new fishing gig, he’s summoned to a nearby island, where a collector encourages him to travel the nearby seas and dredge up several mysterious artifacts.

When the fisherman returns with the artifacts, the collector directs him out into the open ocean for a ritual which, when completed, revives his late wife from the briny depths while also summoning an Eldritch catastrophe that sets the world ablaze. Now, if this is all you saw, you might think you just got duped, but it goes a little deeper than that.

If the fisherman attempts to resist the collector, he realizes that the collector doesn’t even exist, he’s just a separate persona that he created to dissociate from his guilt. The fisherman is the one who unleashed the fog of weirdness that plagues the seas and islands, and it’s his wife that drowned because of it. You started all this, and you can make it worse, or you can do the responsible thing and throw the book back, even if you end up getting devoured by a leviathan for it.

Not the Bad Guy You Were Expecting

Metal Gear Solid 5 is, at least on the surface, supposed to show the return of Big Boss following the Peace Walker incident, bridging the gap between the prequel games and the rest of the series. Big Boss is something of an overarching antagonist in the entire Metal Gear series, so it should be obvious that, at least at some point, you’re going to become a bad guy. However, even with that expectation, the game still throws a curveball.

At the very beginning of the game, we see who we assume to be Big Boss waking up in a hospital after being in a coma for a few years, where he’s rescued by a bandaged man calling himself “Ishmael.” As we learn at the end of the game, though, we discover that Ishmael was, in fact, the real Big Boss. Our protagonist, Venom Snake, was just an MSF medic who was on Boss’s helicopter when it was shot down, and subjected to extensive surgery and conditioning to become Boss’s perfect double.

That’s already a pretty big reveal, but at the very end of the game, Venom receives a cassette from Boss revealing the truth, as well as instructions for the Outer Heaven uprising in the very first Metal Gear game. In short, you were the bad guy all along, but a completely different bad guy from the one you thought.