9 Most Sadistic Evil Playthroughs In Gaming

There’s an argument to be made that RimWorld is a straight up war crime simulator. Although, that argument could really be made for a healthy handful of games on this list. That said, 2016 4X game Stellaris lets you commit atrocities across galaxies so pretty much every living thing can suffer under your sadistic whims. If that’s not enough to qualify for one of our top spots, I don’t know what is.

With the mechanical scale and f-ed up features of Crusader Kings and the unhinged freedom of RimWorld, Stellaris is uniquely positioned to make any parent gravely regret buying this game for their kids.

While there have been plenty of games on our list where you can do incredibly vile things, Stellaris enables a level of brutality that many gamers would say pushes the envelope a bit too far. Like, well off the desk and into the realm of planet-wide genocide via the means of orbital strikes, and turning an entire race into slaves, or turning an entire race into food. Or both, I guess. Like I said, a pretty significant trip for the envelope. 

You take on the role of a premade or custom civilisation and naturally some are more geared for evil than others. It’s a bit like how in Twilight Imperium I like to play The Nekro Virus which is just a straight up galactic threat. 

Though it’s less visceral than some other sadistic game playthroughs, the more sickening things you can do in Stellaris are the ones that affect entire planets either by causing mass destruction leaving survivors stranded, grieving, or starving, forcibly enslaving people into following your religion through brainwashing, or causing planet-wide natural disasters. Stellaris appears to be a fairly innocuous if complex 4x strategy game but under the hood it houses just about every evil possibility you could ever imagine unleashing on an unsuspecting universe. 

It’s enough to make you a bit queasy. Although that could be because my dinner was half a block of cheese and a bunch of red licorice. Let’s find out by jumping into our last entry in this list of awesome, yucky, and deeply messed up playthroughs.