The Hook: The Allure of the Dark Side
In the sanitized landscape of modern role-playing games, the concept of "choice" has often been reduced to a binary aesthetic. We are presented with a dialogue wheel where the "evil" option is merely a red-tinted line of text—a way to be slightly more abrasive before ultimately saving the day. This safety net ensures that the player remains the hero, protecting the narrative from any truly irreversible damage. But there is a deeper, more transgressive curiosity that many players harbor: the desire to see the world not just challenged, but broken.
True narrative evil isn't about being "aggro" or pithy; it is about the "horrible and life-ruining" consequences of unchecked agency. It is the ability to betray trust, erase entire civilizations, and leave the game world objectively and permanently worse. To engage with these paths is to move beyond the role of a protagonist and into the role of a catastrophe. The following games represent the pinnacle of this design, offering routes that are as fascinatingly dark as they are structurally devastating.
When Cruelty is the Job Description
In most titles, heroism is the baseline and villainy is a deviation. Games like Tyranny and Warhammer 40k: Rogue Trader subvert this fundamental trope by establishing "Systemic Evil" as the default state of existence. In Tyranny, you aren't an aspiring hero; you are an agent of an unambiguously evil overlord tasked with the final "pacification" of a resistant province. Here, kindness is the "challenge run"—a bizarre anomaly that leaves NPCs shocked, disappointed, or even angry. To play "correctly" within the game’s logic is to assist in an empire that impales entire villages on spikes.
This removal of the heroic safety net is mirrored in Rogue Trader, where you occupy the role of the "Rich Dickhead" in a universe that is famously grim. You aren't a ragtag adventurer; you are a dynastic dictator commanding a ship manned by thousands of laborers who have toiled for centuries. The game rewards you for leaning into the "imperious" and "dogmatic" nature of your station. It allows you to command subordinates to talk on your behalf or demand they announce your presence every time you enter a room. In these worlds, being a "loyal servant" requires you to treat subordinates as mere gristle in a war machine. When the moral baseline is shifted so far toward the dark, "goodness" becomes the most difficult and least incentivized path to navigate.
The Permanent Erasure of Fairfield
As a case study in permanent consequence, The Outer Worlds 2 offers one of the most calculated examples of objective cruelty in the "Paradise Island" quest line. While standard RPG tropes might offer a choice between two evils, this game allows for a specifically "total bastard" maneuver regarding the Vox relay station. A player can technically evacuate the lightly populated Protectorate-controlled town of Westfield to the central hub of Fairfield—seemingly a mercy—only to then deliberately target Fairfield for the station's crash.
The result is a permanent act of "dickishness" that the game refuses to walk back. Every NPC, shop, side quest, and recurring character in Fairfield is deleted from the game world forever. You are left with a single, traumatized survivor as a living monument to your choice. This isn't an aesthetic change or a temporary dip in reputation; it is the physical removal of content and life from the game. The world becomes objectively emptier, forcing the player to finish their journey in a silent graveyard of their own making.
The Sinister Art of Proxy Evil
While direct violence is the common currency of the villain, the "Weird Route" in Deltarune explores a significantly more disturbing psychological territory. This path, which surfaces primarily in Act 2 and carries harrowing consequences into Acts 3 and 4, is defined not by your own violence, but by "bullying and cajoling" an innocent character into committing murders on your behalf.
This is the sinister art of proxy evil. It is notoriously unintuitive and well-hidden, requiring a level of mechanical manipulation that makes the player feel "messed up." By forcing a proxy to do the killing, the game creates a feeling of psychological violation that is darker than any standard combat-based genocide path. It turns a light-hearted, cartoony adventure into something genuinely "sinister," casting a shadow over the hometown's most innocent moments and proving that the most effective way to be evil is to corrupt someone else's soul.
A City Built on Chaos
In the world of Dishonored, morality achieves a rare "ludonarrative harmony" where the world physically rots in tandem with the player's choices. The "High Chaos" system isn't just a score; it is an apocalyptic manifestation. As the player chooses the path of revenge and slaughter, the rat plague worsens, the streets become "plague-fested," and the atmosphere shifts toward a total collapse of order. This path moves the narrative away from a standard revenge story and toward a thematic culmination of ruin:
"The final remaining conspirators turn on each other and they all end up dying various deaths. The city falls into total ruin."
This ending highlights the thematic appropriateness of total destruction. The city's fall feels earned—not because of a scripted plot twist, but because the player’s cruelty has finally tipped the world's stability past the point of no return.
The Internal Monster: Living with the "Dark Urge"
Baldur's Gate 3 offers a deeply personal, unpleasant form of evil through its "Dark Urge" origin. Unlike a standard villain who chooses their path, the Dark Urge is a character defined by a biological, insatiable need for violence. The character’s internal monologue provides a haunting thesis for the playthrough:
"My rancid blood whispers to me 'Kill, kill and kill again.'"
Embracing this urge carries a massive narrative cost. You do not lose allies through ideological betrayal; you lose them through literal, cold-blooded murder. Because this path "cuts short" major storylines and permanently prunes significant NPCs, it creates a disjointed and lonely experience. It is often recommended for a second playthrough precisely because it is so destructive to the game's structural integrity, eventually leaving you as the "last creature living," surrounded only by those you have yet to fell.
The Ultimate Isolation: The Swarm That Walks
The pinnacle of narrative destruction is found in the "Swarm That Walks" path in Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous. This secret mythic path transforms the player into a "one-man Eldritch abomination," a choice so extreme that it causes the game’s internal logic to "fall apart." By choosing this route, you consume your own party members and replace your entire army with a mindless, devouring swarm.
This represents the ultimate isolation. By transforming the world and its inhabitants into extensions of your own form, you effectively nullify the free will of every other character. It is a path of total meta-evil where the story ceases to function as a narrative because there are no longer any independent actors to interact with—only the swarm. It is a silent, consumed void that most players avoid, as it represents the absolute end of the world’s capacity for meaning.
The Moral Mirror
These extreme paths are more than just "edgy" diversions; they are essential to the integrity of narrative design. Without the genuine ability to ruin a world, the choice to save it becomes a hollow formality. These games provide a mirror to our own impulses, testing the limits of our empathy and the depths of our curiosity. They suggest that the most intense experiences in gaming are often found in the wreckage of our own making.
Ultimately, these routes serve as a challenge to the player's agency. It takes a certain kind of resolve to follow a path of total destruction to its silent, lonely conclusion. As we look at the ruins of Fairfield or the consumed void of the Swarm, one question remains: "If you've got the imagination for it, being evil doesn't get much more intense than this." Do you have the stomach for it?
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