Don't you get so tired of being the hero all the time? Do you ever look at Bowser and think, "man, King Koopa's got it all figured out"? Does your life philosophy tend to lean more towards "nice guys finish last"?
Then boy, have we got the games for you!
So if you're itching to do crimes and evil deeds, then here are the best bad guy games that can be found on the Nintendo Switch!
(SPOILERS within — tread carefully! The most evil thing you can do to a person is reveal a plot twist when they weren't expecting it...)
Untitled Goose Game (Switch eShop)
Outside of the setting, one of the obvious key attractions of Untitled Goose Game is the fact that you take on the role of a really annoying bird. While the checklist of tasks ensures that you're duty-bound to create mischief, just as much fun can be had creating your own brand of freeform annoyance. Indeed, when we handed the game to someone who had never heard of it before, we were surprised to find that instead of following the objectives, they simply wandered about seeing what items they could steal and hurl into a nearby pond.
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Donut County (Switch eShop)
Donut County opens with a simple premise following the texting conversation between Mira, a young girl, and BK, a talking raccoon, as they discuss work life at a local donut shop. The girl complains about a loud neighbour during this conversation, and hardly a moment later, a mysterious hole appears in the ground that takes the loud neighbour and everything surrounding him.
Moments later, we learn that the hole is being controlled via BK's phone app, and the narrative quickly jumps forward to the near future in which the entire town - including Mira and BK - are trapped at the bottom of that omnipresent hole.
And you're the hole. Can a hole be evil? Apparently.
Undertale (Switch eShop)
There are three main ways you can play Undertale: doing a pacifist run with no kills, a neutral run with some kills, or a genocide run where you kill everything, and seeing all the content the game has to offer requires multiple playthroughs. If you do decide to go the route of violence, combat is handled in a unique and engaging way, and though we won't spoil what happens if you go full genocide... well, it's not called genocide to be cute, is it?
Carrion (Switch eShop)
We haven't played a lot of games that made us feel like a monster. A real predator. The measured and ultimately law-abiding stealth of the Batman: Arkham series had its power-fantasy moments, but nothing that made us sit back and think for a minute about what we've done. Enter Carrion.
Taking control of an amorphous, many-tentacled eldritch thing, you slither and writhe and stalk and pounce through an enormous industrial facility, finding out what happens when vulnerable fleshy humans come face-to-face with an entity that's 150% teeth and claws by volume. (Spoiler: It's not pretty.)
Destroy All Humans! (Switch)
Destroy All Humans sees players assume the role of Crypto, a rather vicious little alien who sounds suspiciously like Jack Nicholson, as he arrives on Earth in order to gather Furon DNA and investigate the whereabouts of his predecessor, a clone who vanished while undertaking the very same mission.
Blasting humans to bits, exploding their skulls and pulling their brains out their rear ends is great fun, and Destroy All Humans nails the B-movie villain vibe.
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (Switch)
Some games force you to be evil (like the ones above). Some give you the option to do nice things, or do horrible things. Isn't it more evil to choose evil?
In Skyrim, as in many Bethesda games, tries to tempt you over to the dark side throughout the game. Oh, it would be so easy to steal from this shop. They've just got tiaras all over the place! Why not kill the shopkeeper, stuff his body in a barrel, and saunter out of the place like nothing happened? What's the worst case scenario — guards turn up to get you? Meh, just kill 'em too.
Oh dear, we think we might have learned some bad lessons from Skyrim.
Tropico 6 (Switch)
Management sim Tropico 6 offers a more real-world kind of bad guy — the kind that exploits the land and its people for their own gain. Sure, you could play a citizen-serving El Presidente throughout the various eras in the game, but if you consider happiness a poor investment of your profits, then you can run a beautiful little dictatorship under an iron fist, instead.
Maneater (Switch)
Sharks aren't inherently evil — they're just hungry, and they don't care about the difference between tasty fish and tasty human legs, do they?
Arguably, Maneater's shark isn't evil as much as he is revengey. Kicking off with the murder of your mother at the hands of celebrity shark hunter Scaly Pete (whose hand you bite off in the opening scenes), Maneater wastes no time in flinging you into the fins of a newly orphaned baby shark who wants to eat EVERYTHING in sight, in order to evolve into a flipping mega-shark — an apex killer with the skills and abilities to face off against your hook-handed nemesis and avenge your momma once and for all. Chomp chomp.
Saints Row IV: Re-Elected (Switch)
Few games do ‘fun’ with as much enthusiasm and self-awareness as Saints Row. While GTA tempers its acerbic tone and pop culture devotion with a firm set of in-game rules, Volition’s open-world series has always aired towards the silly and the slapstick. Want to throw yourself into oncoming traffic and ragdoll your way to insurance riches? It’s got you covered. Want to fight off zombie hordes? Star in your own sci-fi B-movie? Have tank battles while in freefall? Check, check and check.
Saints Row's brand of psychopathy is much sillier and more gleeful than most, but you can still beat a guy to death with a tentacle bat. And yeah, that's pretty evil, no?
LEGO DC Super-Villains (Switch)
LEGO DC Super-Villains offers the chance to play as a rogues' gallery of characters we’ve always fought from the other side, and it makes for an eclectic new roster. Clayface can change his shape to mimic other powers or pose as another character in order to gain access to new areas, the Joker can recruit goons to perform unique tasks and Reverse Flash can enter the 'Speed Force' to create super-builds in spectacular fashion.
Just be aware that this is a LEGO game, not a Mature-rated Suicide Squad game, so sugar-coated naughtiness is the order of the day. It seems almost a waste that you're being the bad guy but can't entirely indulge your truly wicked side. Still, it's better than boring ol' Superman.
LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga (Switch)
Star Wars stuff is too often about being the boring goody-goody Jedi, who are supposed to be morally dubious — like, have you even SEEN the movies? We're not saying Anakin was right, but he had a decent point about the Jedi being arrogant, ineffective traditionalists who are too easy to manipulate — but in Skywalker Saga, you can play as the Sith, too. And they're actually evil. Like, child murder evil. Fun!
Comments 19
Good list. I got a mess of these. Being the bad guy is way more fun.
And thanks for saying that about sharks.
Another game I would suggest would be No Man’s Sky. You can be a space pirate and plunder freighters, piss off sentinels (who are basically the space police), and destroy people’s ships. It’s fun, but pretty evil.
HONK is the sound of evil
Goose is not bad, he is missunderstood!
@Kermit1 HONK HONK, that's the sound of the geese.
I'd argue strongly that both in Carrion and definitely in Maneater humanity is at least as bad as the protagonist. I mean, experimenting on a creature, or killing a shark's mother... Humans kill way more sharks (and WAY WAY more animals in general) than sharks do. And if a shark gets a human leg to munch on... Well, unlike in the game sometimes, it's not the shark that got on land, it's humans that were looking for the Darwin award by going swimming where sharks live.
A goose stealing clothes is more of a bad guy than the protagonists of GTA?
Maneater was such a fun game.
@Kermit1 as someone who lives in the middle of Canada, I have to agree.
Lot of games. Hitman 3.
Didn't mention Nefarious, opinion invalid
You've forgotten Zelda and a ton of classic rpgs in this list-- sure they pretend you are playing the hero, but you are constantly stealing from houses and breaking everyone's pottery!
More seriously, rain on my parade is even more 'just being an incredible jerk' than even Goose Game.
Kind of surprised Retro City Rampage DX is here but not its successor, Shakedown Hawaii, which I feel looks and plays better.
Nonetheless, this article has got me curious about Maneater. I should check it out.
Thief Simulator is one of my favorites. Not the most polished game, but lots of fun to be had. Also, I'd really have to recommend Saints Row 3 over 4. The best reasoning I can give is that 4 feels like if you took 3 and overloaded it with mods that make most of the base game's mechanics completely pointless. If anything, it should have just been DLC, since the majority of it is recycled content from 3 anyway.
@FishyS And Mario. It’s been rehashed many times by more interesting people, but Mario is a pretty randomly murderous dude. In the Galaxy games, he has a penchant for killing newborns minding their own business.
Undertale is amazing! As for the rest of the games on this list.
I did the genocide route and then felt bad so I did another pacifist route, well, let’s just say it’s not that easy, so I deleted it to fix the issue, did another pacifist route, and then let the world I love so much rest (:
Untitled Goose Game is so charming, the peaceful British village, the Goose, the ending... it's a perfect little game.
Cloud Retainer no1's fan's seal of approval
Undertale, though. Is killing monsters even bad, provided what they did? killed six children and are planning to kill you to go and ultimately do a genocide run on humanity
Undertale would be a better bad guy game if it wasn't so blatantly telegraphing that you'd be judged at the end and heavy handedly punishing you for it throughout with guilt trips. Not to mention you're not so much making a choice of paths as clearing one of multiple required predetermined routes to view the true ending. Cool battle system though.
@Poodlestargenerica I think you’re underestimating just how naughty that naughty little goose is. Let me tell you, it is a naughty, naughty, naughty goose.
How is dead by daylight not on this list? There's some pretty awesome killers to torment the rest of the player base with.
Carrion was brilliant, there are so many different ways of playing the game, either being stealthy and hide in the pipes and slowly take people out, or just burst in and grab as many people as possible and fling them at other humans.
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