Play as The Monster

[Rakoa]

I'm a tad new to this neck of the forums, but I was thinking about this today and decided this would be the best way to get some other voices chiming on the topic, hopefully those who enjoy this type of game as much as I do.

Truth be told, I've seen very few games that allow you to play as The Monster, at least as I envision it. Some games, like Evolve or Left 4 Dead 2, have that sort of thing going on, but it isn't really the right type of thing for me. I'm a big fan of the video game Aliens vs. Predators because of how GREAT the Alien side of things is! Sneaking through the darkness with perfect vision, destroying lights, moving with freedom on nearly surface, stealthily taking down scared enemies...that is right up my alley! I suppose you could say that I prefer horror rather than action when playing as The Monster. Similarly, I quite enjoyed Damned, despite some obvious problems.

This thread is mostly to give people the chance to talk about games in which you play as The Monster. I wasn't able to find much from Googling around. Perhaps you folks have some ideas, or even an opinion on the topic. Or maybe it's just me. Only one way to find out!

[Flickerdart]

Sounds like you would enjoy Dishonored or the Arkham games (and to a lesser extent, Thief, Deus Ex HR, Splinter Cell) - Corvo and Batman are excellent monsters in the darkness.

[Starwulf]

Sounds like you would enjoy Dishonored or the Arkham games (and to a lesser extent, Thief, Deus Ex HR, Splinter Cell) - Corvo and Batman are excellent monsters in the darkness.

But neither of your examples(Corvo and Batman) ARE actual monsters. They are the good guys(per se). The OP appears to be referencing(and wanting references to) games where you are the BAD guy, the evil silent, stalking monster that prowls around murdering the good guys.

[Hiro Protagonest]

...Prototype?

[Rakoa]

Sounds like you would enjoy Dishonored or the Arkham games (and to a lesser extent, Thief, Deus Ex HR, Splinter Cell) - Corvo and Batman are excellent monsters in the darkness.

I never considered Dishonoured or Arkham (largely for the reasons Starwulf suggest below) but in retrospect, you're right, this is probably the reason I enjoyed each of those as much as I did. The tactical freedom of mobility, silent executions, and all that are a blast.


But neither of your examples(Corvo and Batman) ARE actual monsters. They are the good guys(per se). The OP appears to be referencing(and wanting references to) games where you are the BAD guy, the evil silent, stalking monster that prowls around murdering the good guys.

You're right, those are where my preferences lie, but I wouldn't say Flickerdart is off the mark. Besides, as much as I am looking for suggestions here, I'm fine with others discussing similar and related concepts.


...Prototype?

I never tried Prototype. I might just look into it later.

[factotum]

But neither of your examples(Corvo and Batman) ARE actual monsters. They are the good guys(per se).

In the case of Corvo, that depends entirely how you play the game. You can play as the good guy, and try to get through without killing anyone (it's even possible to find alternatives to killing your actual assassination targets, although when said alternative might mean having their tongues cut out and working down a mine for the rest of their natural life, it's debatable if that's the "good" option), or you can just kill everything that moves regardless of whether it's in your way or not.

[Balain]

Lord of The Rings Online had monsterplay. Originally when you had a character reach level 10 monsterplay would open up. There is aspecial area where the monster characters and the non monster characters would. eet to fight over control of varios locations.

[Corlindale]

Giants: Citizen Kabuto is an old classic, but still a fantastic game. Both campaign and mp features 3 factions, one of which is simply a gigantic monster. It was hilarious to play as Kabuto in multiplayer.

[GolemsVoice]

There was/is the Half Life mod Natural Selection, which is a lot like Aliens vs. Marines. Don't know how active it still is, though.

[CarpeGuitarrem]

There was/is the Half Life mod Natural Selection, which is a lot like Aliens vs. Marines. Don't know how active it still is, though.
Tremulous (http://tremulous.net/) is a similar game; I haven't played NS, but Tremulous has asymmetrical gameplay between the two sides--both sides have to build up a base and defenses, and while the humans slowly upgrade their firepower and stay relatively static otherwise, the aliens are slowly earning evolution points to turn into bigger, more powerful forms. They actually start out pretty weak (but fast), and can then branch out into other forms.

[KillianHawkeye]

Dungeon Keeper is a real-time strategy/base building game series where you actually play as the stereotypical evil overlord trying to take over the countryside. Your goal is to expand your dungeon, build up its defenses, and train your minions so you can defeat the heroes who eventually come to put an end to your reign of villainy.

It may not be exactly what you had it mind, but it's always the first thing I think of when somebody mentions games where you play as the bad guys.

[Brother Oni]

You could dress up as an oni in Tenchu Z (well a hannya mask and a big wig) and pretend to be a critter that goes bump (and stab) in the night.

Some of the open world games certainly supports the desired play style (Dishonoured and Prototype have been mentioned). To a lesser extent, Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines lets you play as an old World of Darkness vampire, which can be monstrous in shape and deed.

Tecmo's Deception series lets you be the stereotypical evil mastermind who controls trapped rooms that heroes have to get through.

[danzibr]

Wizardry IV.
There's a LotR game for PS2 where you unlock missions for bad guys.
Hmm... ... ... This is a great thread.

[NeoVid]

Probably can't find this series any longer, but I always loved Tecmo's Deception series. Adventurers constantly try to find the secrets of a haunted, booby-trapped mansion/dungeon/castle... but you're the one doing the haunting. You don't have the ability to fight directly, which forces you to be inventive with your conjured traps. Very different from any other series I've played, and has a lot of emergent combos (and evil laughs) as you're figuring out how to make one trap lead your victims into another...

As for other games in the style you already like, Shadow of Mordor seems like another you'd enjoy. You're playing as a supernaturally powered, undead killing machine, except it's easy to consider yourself the good guy when you're only massacring Uruks...

[The_Jackal]

The truth is that you're ALWAYS playing as the monster. You are the terrifying, invincible aggressor, a predator among sheep.

[The_Snark]

Sounds like you would enjoy Dishonored or the Arkham games (and to a lesser extent, Thief, Deus Ex HR, Splinter Cell) - Corvo and Batman are excellent monsters in the darkness.

Shadows of Mordor is another game in this category, I've heard: use stealth and dark magic to terrorize legions of orcs.

[Leecros]

Personally Overlord and Overlord II comes to mind for me. It's quite an enjoyable(although unfortunately short-lived) series where you play an evil overlord trying to conquer the land. It's sort of an action/RPG game, but it definitely has some...control issues. You have a weapon, health, and mana and can hit things. Which is fine, but you also can summon minions. Basically, goblin-like creatures that you can order around with your mouse in a fairly non-intuitive manner(there's partial controller support, but i can't comment on that as i've never used it).

However, both games suffer from a major flaw in the sense that it doesn't do Good vs Evil so much as Evil vs Greater Evil. In the first Overlord, you're tasked with taking over the world and getting revenge upon the heroes that murdered your predecessor. Unfortunately, it becomes quite apparent rather quickly that all(more or less) of the "Heroes" have become quite decadent and malignant within their respective communities and they(the communities) would fare far better without them. The second games takes it to even more extremes where the antagonists of that game is an empire that wishes to wipe out all magic and magical creatures in the world.

It also has a fairly camp atmosphere. So if you're looking for a game that takes itself seriously...Overlord is definitely not within that category.

However, despite it's flaws, i do find it to be a fairly enjoyable game and do go back and play through it every now and then. Plus as far as games goes, it's fairly cheap, $4.99 USD for the original game and $9.99 USD for Overlord II


(Overlord 1 was released in 2007...8 years ago wow i'm old).

[Rodin]

Probably can't find this series any longer, but I always loved Tecmo's Deception series. Adventurers constantly try to find the secrets of a haunted, booby-trapped mansion/dungeon/castle... but you're the one doing the haunting. You don't have the ability to fight directly, which forces you to be inventive with your conjured traps. Very different from any other series I've played, and has a lot of emergent combos as you're figuring out combos.



I looked into this series, and I have two questions.

1) How the hell haven't I heard of these games!?!? They look fantastic!

2) It looks like the latest one is available on PS3 and Vita (and an updated re-release coming up next week for PS4 and Vita), and I'm curious to know whether there's a significant difference in quality between the two versions. Do the games lend themselves well to portable play, and is there a major difference in quality between the two versions?

[Brother Oni]

I looked into this series, and I have two questions.

1) How the hell haven't I heard of these games!?!? They look fantastic!

2) It looks like the latest one is available on PS3 and Vita (and an updated re-release coming up next week for PS4 and Vita), and I'm curious to know whether there's a significant difference in quality between the two versions. Do the games lend themselves well to portable play, and is there a major difference in quality between the two versions?

They were very niche games, with the first disappearing in a wave of Japanese games that were translated into English.

The second was more popular and has a very dark plot - the protagonist was abducted at a very young age and conditioned into serving the ruling class which were very long lived blue skinned beings. She's then tasked to guard various locations against the human resistance and one of them turns out to be your brother.
Depending on your choices during the mission (primarily, who you kill or spare), you get different endings, ranging from bad (murder everything and the devil itself comes and takes you into his fold) to good (you break the ruling class and free humanity) to questionable (you run away with your brother and a later picture shows you with child, with the insinuation that your brother is the father).

I missed the third one, but I got the 4th, Trapt. Very pretty game with a greater diversity of maps, although the elaborate super traps really need a skip button. I never completed this one, but there's multiple endings as well apparently.

Of the games I've played, of particular note are the background stories and information of your victims, including their age, vocation and a brief blurb. Some make you feel guilty (one victim was just a poor peasant who wandered into your mansion by accident - if you kill him, his mother turns up later to look for him), while others are just plain mean (an adventurers party turns up, where there's a tangled relationship web of unreciprocated/unrequited love going on between them).
The ingame currency reward for killing them (used to unlock new traps and toys) usually salves any remorse though. :smallbiggrin:


I don't think the games lend well to portable play as you need good situational and positional awareness of the hapless foolsadventurers which ideally needs a bigger screen, but it apparently sold well enough to warrant a re-release.
Looking at information, the 're-release' is actually the previous game with an expansion pack, and the previous game scored well in Japanese reviews, getting 34/40. Thanks for finding it - I think I found my next purchase. :smallbiggrin:

[Djinn_in_Tonic]

Natural Selection 2 is a multiplayer FPS / RTS hybrid (one commander, a bunch of FPS teammates) where you can play as a Marine or one of a wide variety of upgradable monsters that can climb walls, teleport, fly, create terrain, or simply eat an entire magazine of bullets without stopping. Might be up your alley.

[hamishspence]

There was also a Jaws game as I recall, where you play the shark.

[Brother Oni]

There was also a Jaws game as I recall, where you play the shark.

There's also Depth (http://www.depthgame.com/) where it's sharks versus divers.

[Lost Demiurge]

Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines is a pretty good one. Plays a bit like a third-person PoV Deus Ex, with multiple approaches to most problems. (Well, save for a long combat section where they got lazy in the endgame of things.) You get to stalk people, drink their blood, do horrible things for your horrible boss, and claw your way up the vampiric underworld.

You can be a nice monster or a horrible monster, but you're still a monster. It's just that there are other monsters out there too...

[Rodin]

They were very niche games, with the first disappearing in a wave of Japanese games that were translated into English.

The second was more popular and has a very dark plot - the protagonist was abducted at a very young age and conditioned into serving the ruling class which were very long lived blue skinned beings. She's then tasked to guard various locations against the human resistance and one of them turns out to be your brother.
Depending on your choices during the mission (primarily, who you kill or spare), you get different endings, ranging from bad (murder everything and the devil itself comes and takes you into his fold) to good (you break the ruling class and free humanity) to questionable (you run away with your brother and a later picture shows you with child, with the insinuation that your brother is the father).

I missed the third one, but I got the 4th, Trapt. Very pretty game with a greater diversity of maps, although the elaborate super traps really need a skip button. I never completed this one, but there's multiple endings as well apparently.

Of the games I've played, of particular note are the background stories and information of your victims, including their age, vocation and a brief blurb. Some make you feel guilty (one victim was just a poor peasant who wandered into your mansion by accident - if you kill him, his mother turns up later to look for him), while others are just plain mean (an adventurers party turns up, where there's a tangled relationship web of unreciprocated/unrequited love going on between them).
The ingame currency reward for killing them (used to unlock new traps and toys) usually salves any remorse though. :smallbiggrin:


I don't think the games lend well to portable play as you need good situational and positional awareness of the hapless foolsadventurers which ideally needs a bigger screen, but it apparently sold well enough to warrant a re-release.
Looking at information, the 're-release' is actually the previous game with an expansion pack, and the previous game scored well in Japanese reviews, getting 34/40. Thanks for finding it - I think I found my next purchase. :smallbiggrin:

Thanks for the info, I'll hold out until next week then and pick up the PS4 version. It sounds like my favorite part of the Dungeon Keeper games, setting up loads of traps to mess over the heroes.

[Brother Oni]

Thanks for the info, I'll hold out until next week then and pick up the PS4 version. It sounds like my favorite part of the Dungeon Keeper games, setting up loads of traps to mess over the heroes.

It's less setting up loads of traps and more combo-ing traps well. In the games I've played, you had three categories of traps (Floor, Wall and Ceiling), each level you could bring 2/3 traps per category but you could only have one trap per category set at a time. Once you fired a trap, that class went onto cooldown, plus there was a setup time when you mount a new trap.

In order to really rack up the combos, you had to combine your own traps with environmental hazards; for example an adventurer is climbing some stairs. As he reaches the top, you throw him back down the stairs with a catapult Floor trap right into a pre-existing spiked wall. As he pulls himself off the spikes, you fire a Wall mounted buzzsaw at him, sending him half way across the room, right under the Ceiling oil vase trap. As he pulls the vase off his head, you detonate your re-tasked Floor bomb trap (since the cooldown off the catapult has finished), sending flying into a fireplace environmental hazard, setting him on fire (which he takes extra damage from as you covered him in oil earlier).

You do have to be very careful not to hoist yourself by your own petard though - for example lightning traps combo well with water pools, just don't be standing in the water when you trigger it.

[Stuebi]

You mentioned AvP in the first post, which sadly represents my goto when people ask about being the monster. It's to date the only game I've played were you truly, actually feel like a thing from a monster movie.

As weird as it may sound, but I would actually LOVE to get this mirror perspective for some of the games in the current generation. Imagine playing Amnesia as one of the Monsters. Or a Resident Evil where the player is the hideously mutated tentacle-thing (Altough Prototype did this to an extent, but you could've replaced the main guy with any John Doe with super powers and it would've been the same thing.).

[Rodin]

I remember playing one of the custom games in Subspace Continuum (a multiplayer top-down shooter with minimal graphics) where one player started as the "Zombie" and all of the other players were "Survivors". You had to survive on a map depicting a mansion and its grounds until the rescue ferries arrived to take you off the island after 20 minutes. What made it hard was that each time the Zombie player killed, that player would be resurrected as a Zombie. Also, unlike the Survivors, the Zombies respawned.

As time went on, more and more Zombies would rise as players were inevitably killed. The Survivors were faster than the Zombies, but that only helped so much when you were being chased by 30 Zombie players.

I'd really like to see an FPS version of that. Have a large mansion with secret passages, places to hide, etc. Then have one player playing as an eldritch abomination or vampire that is unstoppable, but which can be run away from by savvy players. Each time the monster kills, that player rises as a Ghoul. Ghouls would be tough to take down, but can be defeated...but they respawn. Also, they share chat with the monster, so even if you eradicate the ghouls by setting up a defensive wall with multiple other players, the monster will soon be on its way.