A fair few games over the years have tried to flip the script and force you to play as the bad guy. However, not that many succeed at that goal. They either make you perform all the usual heroics while wearing a slightly different hat, or they chicken out when it comes to letting you be truly horrible. The far better approach, it seems, is to just make being a bit of a meanie optional. When you're given that level of freedom, the evil in us all comes storming out. You could help the starving puppy find a home, but wouldn't you rather use it as ammo in your canine cannon?

Today, we’re going to celebrate those games that let you release your darker side; where being a jerk can lead to so much fun. Don’t feel bad—you’re only as evil as everyone else.
 

Untitled Goose Game

Crimes: Waterfowl behavior

OK, fair enough; this is a game about being pure evil. The bluff of Untitled Goose Game is in the sweetness of its presentation, as well as its gorgeous cartoon graphics, the quiescent setting, and the fact that you’re playing as a fluffy bird. However, as the game’s tagline puts it: “It's a lovely morning in the village and you are a horrible goose.”

Picture the scene: you’re pottering away in your garden while your kids play with a ball in the quiet street outside. All is serene—that is, except for the goose that’s invaded your yard and dragged all your pumpkins into a pond, and broke the broom, and threw the radio in a puddle. Did we mention that it trapped your son in a phone box?

That’s what Untitled Goose Game is all about: just being a complete jackass of a gander, needlessly upsetting as many people as you can in order to cross tasks off a list. Why does the goose have a list of spiteful tasks? All geese have a list of spiteful tasks.
 

Goat Simulator 3

Crimes: Breaking and entering (also licking)

The only animal more of a complete pig than a goose is a goat. Hence Goat Simulator 3, a game about being the worst goat possible.

Spoofing just about as many open-world games as it can, GS3 takes place on the island of San Angora, and it has you play as—well, a goat. On this farm, you basically just create havoc: You charge into people, objects, and other animals, hopefully setting up a string of explosions that destroy swathes of land in the process.

There are all manner of mini-quests to complete, which invariably require you to cause mayhem, upset people, or drive a combine harvester through a wall. There are also mini-quests, such as performing a triple-backflip, or exploding 10 people at the same time.

But the most important thing here is sticking your tongue to a person and then dragging them around the farmyard while they scream for help. This is fine.
 

Hitman 3

Crimes: Assassination

You could argue that there’s no real way to be a nice hitman. It’s not the sort of job you can mention at parties without making the conversation turn a little uncomfortable. (“Oh, uh, really? That’s… you must… did you study it at college?”) The Hitman series allows access to the entire spectrum of murder methods, from the invisibly subtle to the needlessly cruel. And this has never more the case than in Hitman 3. 

In this game, you can dress up as a cocktail bartender, brazenly poison the drink of your victim, then put it directly in front of him. You can find incriminating evidence that your target screwed over his wife, have her stumble on it, then and let her take care of her spouse. Try replacing a regular golf ball with an explosive one, then watch your unlucky victim tee themself off this mortal coil. Or you can fire enough employees of the same boss; eventually, one of them will be mad enough to get revenge on him. 

Hands on, or hands off. Either way, engineering these elaborate hits is definitely a dark art.   
 

Grand Theft Auto V

Crimes: All of them

Speeding, stealing cars, robbing banks, and wearing garish shirts—there are so many crimes in Grand Theft Auto V that it would be easier to list all the benign activities instead. You can play tennis, for instance, or a have round of golf. 

But being bad is woven into the fabric of Los Santos. It’s a place where grenade launchers lie in middle of the street, just waiting to be fired. Crimes range from gently nudging a LSPD car to stealing military jets. 

The Wanted System should act as a tether. Starting at one star, when you catch the eye of the LSPD for merely doing a burn-out right in front of them, you can outrun them until things calm down. Or you can choose to escalate things. Grab the game’s fastest car, drive it the wrong way down the highway, and cause enough of a ruckus for the LSPD to begin a proper pursuit; the Warning Stars accrue like blood on a windshield. Keep up the dangerous driving and random destruction of everything you see, and the army will soon follow. Beyond that, there is only the intensity of their proportional response. At five stars, tanks blast, choppers circle, and you probably regret wearing that shirt. 
 

EVE Online

Crimes: Extortion, embezzlement, terrorism

It’s possible to play EVE Online, the 20-year-old space-faring MMO, as a perfectly decent person. You can run a mining organization, or run supplies from planet to planet, or captain an enormous fleet of warships staffed by dozens of other players. Or you can destroy an entire economy instead.

The scale at which people have performed acts of terribleness in EVE is like nothing else in gaming—griefers have delivered operatic levels of horror to its entire universe, stretching out into the real world. This is a game where piracy, protection rackets, and ransom are features, not bugs, and where players have seen ships worth almost $10,000 in real-life money destroyed in combat.

But greatest of all must be Samantha Myth, who spent 16 months infiltrating the Amamake Police, became very close friends with another player called Tikktokk Tokkzikk, and then conned him into giving Samantha his unique, famous ship. At which point Samantha immediately defected, taking the $1,550 ship and putting it up for sale.
 

Mass Effect

Crimes: Sci-fi megadeaths

The Mass Effect series unquestionably includes several of the greatest science fiction games of all time. From its galaxy-spanning three-part  adventure to its unambiguously brilliant ending, to the relationships between all of the game’s characters, the tale of Commander Shepard is one to treasure. Oh, and it also lets you commit giga murder. 

Being a BioWare game—those kings of the moral choice RPG—Shepard has the opportunity to be a colossal jerk at many points in all three games. When encountering many of the intricately crafted NPCs, you can bring them joy and comfort, or you can make them feel like scum every time you talk. Via its binary Paragon vs Renegade morality system, the number of bastard choices you make impacts how the universe sees you.

But even if you put all these opportunities aside, all three games have moments where you can wipe out entire races, and not all of them are (somehow) collectively evil! Had enough of the Geth? They’re gone. The Reapers? Reaped. Heck, you can even sabotage the cure for an engineered plague to knock out one race. And let's not forget the 300,000 Batarians you have no choice but to kill in one of the DLCs.