10 Video Games That Reward You For Being Evil

"Nice guys finish last" has never been so true.

InFamous Cole MacGrath
Sony Interactive Entertainment

In any story across any kind of medium, we're accustomed to seeing things from the hero's point of view - generally speaking, that's just how narratives are best told.

In video games, we often have no choice but to play as the good guys (even if, a lot of the time, "good" actually means "brutally murders a lot of henchmen who probably had wives and kids"), and we're consistently rewarded for playing by the rules, making virtuous choices, and, well, just being a stand-up kind of gamer!

But some games do things differently. Some games not only offer you the choice to be evil, but they actually encourage you to go down that route, dishing out rewards left, right, and centre as a result of your dastardly deeds.

It's often the case that the whole point of these games is to be as evil as you possibly can, but sometimes, it's a moral choice. In those cases, being bad is almost always the more fun, satisfying option - because ultimately, being a goody two-shoes simply isn't as exciting as unleashing your inner villain.

10. Oddworld: Abe's Exoddus

Oddworld Abe's Exoddus maximum casualties ending
GT Interactive Software

Kooky PS1 platformer Oddworld: Abe's Exoddus tries to get you to play nice, with the main thrust of the game revolving around protagonist Abe's mission to save his fellow Mudokons from a grisly fate.

There are hundreds of the creatures to rescue throughout the story, and while you could go out of your way to save them and unlock the game's good ending, you actually get a much cooler reward if you decide to be a bit more murderous.

If you successfully kill all the Mudokons in the game, you'll be greeted with a message congratulating you on a job well done, praising your lethal efforts. The message also informs you that you are now "bulletproof", before sending you back to the FeeCo section of the game and letting you play through the whole thing again.

And that mention of "bulletproof" isn't an exaggeration, either - Abe is now impossible to kill. In other words, the game rewards your murder spree by effectively giving you an invincibility cheat, so don't feel too bad if your initial playthrough is an absolute Mudokon bloodbath.

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Danny has been with WhatCulture for over ten years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. In 2022, he took charge of WhoCulture and has grown it into the biggest Doctor Who channel on YouTube, and one of the biggest Doctor Who communities on the web full-stop. He has been writing and video editing since his early teens, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers, off the back of a burning obsession with the Matt Smith era of the show. Like many his age, he first got into Doctor Who with the 2005 revival, but has since gone back and fallen in love with the classic years too. If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order, or to give you a random factoid about the making of Gridlock, Danny is the person to ask!