10 Video Games That Trick You Into Playing The Villain

By 2009 we probably should've known better than to trust superhuman amnesiacs, but open-world action game Prototype nevertheless managed to play us all like a damn fiddle.

Protagonist Alex Mercer wakes up in New York at the start of the game with no memory and an array of shapeshifting abilities at his disposal, not to mention enhanced strength, speed, durability, and so on.

Manhattan is overrun with infected monsters created by a virus known as Blacklight, only for it to be revealed later in the game that Mercer not only helped create the virus, but ended up releasing it himself in a moment of desperation.

As a result, he's responsible for both infecting the city and causing his own "superheroic" transformation, not to mention every other destructive act he commits over the course of the game itself.

Though the first Prototype was a tad shy about admitting just how villainous Alex truly was, the sequel cast him in a less-ambiguous antagonist role, while the player controlled new hero James Heller.