BOSS MONSTER GAMES: PLAYING THE BAD GUY

The first time I played Carrion I was sitting on my couch around midnight, eating leftover pizza, and within ten minutes I had a small panic at how much I was enjoying being the thing in the vent. A scientist saw me and screamed, and I lunged out of a grate, wrapped my tendrils around him, and ate him whole. Then his friend ran. I caught the friend. I ate the friend. The pizza got cold because I forgot it existed. I just kept playing the monster.

That feeling, the one where you finally get to be the thing the heroes train their whole careers to defeat, is what this whole post is about. Boss monster games. Not games where you fight a boss monster. Games where YOU are the boss monster. Where the camera is positioned behind the antagonist and the entire reward structure of the game has been built to encourage your worst impulses.

There are not nearly enough of these games, which is part of why the ones that exist tend to become cult classics. Let me run through the good ones, the weird ones, and the card game that somehow turned into a video game about being the dungeon you used to raid.

Carrion, the inverted Metroidvania

Carrion is the cleanest expression of the boss monster fantasy I have ever played. You are a red biomass with teeth and tentacles, escaping from the kind of underground research facility that exists only to be escaped from. The whole game is a Metroidvania, except instead of you being a small humanoid sneaking past horrors, you ARE the horror, and the small humanoids are scrambling to call security.

The movement is what sells it. Most games where you play a monster make the monster lumber. Carrion makes the monster pour. You flow through vents, smash through walls, split your own mass to fit through narrow gaps, then reform on the other side. Every room becomes a problem of efficient consumption. There is a guy with a flamethrower in the corner. There is a guy with a shotgun on the catwalk. There is one unarmed scientist trying to call for help on a wall phone. In what order do I eat these people, and what is the optimal route through the vents to do it?

The reverse Metroidvania structure is genuinely brilliant. In a normal Metroidvania you find a power up that lets you reach a previously locked area. In Carrion, your powers are tied to your size. You shed mass to gain agility for tight tunnels, then absorb biomass to grow larger and gain more violent abilities. Your inventory IS your body, and your body is in constant flux. No game has done this before or since, and Phobia Game Studio deserves a knighthood for thinking of it.

Plague Inc, where you are the disease

This one stretches the definition of boss monster, but only in the sense that the boss monster is invisible and one nanometer wide. In Plague Inc you play a disease. Your goal is to kill every human on Earth. The win condition is extinction.

What makes Plague Inc work is the counter play. You are not unopposed. The CDC and the WHO and various national governments are all running scripts in the background to detect you, develop cures, close borders, and quarantine outbreaks. You have to spread quietly enough to infect the whole population before anyone notices, then turn lethal at the exact moment that maximum damage can be done. Become deadly too early and Greenland closes its ports before you can get there. Wait too long and the cure ships before you finish the job.

I have lost so many runs to Greenland. If you have played this game you understand. Greenland is the final boss of every Plague Inc playthrough, even though I am the one who is supposed to be the boss.

The game also has a weirdly educational quality. After enough hours you start understanding real epidemiology in a way that no textbook could have taught me. Then COVID happened and I felt strange about all of it. Still played it though.

Dungeon Keeper, the original

Bullfrog and Peter Molyneux made Dungeon Keeper in 1997 and it remains the platonic ideal of villain gameplay. You build a dungeon under a mountain. Heroes show up to raid it. You kill the heroes. The economy is run by imps you can slap when they are slacking off. Your monsters need to be paid and fed or they will revolt. The narrator is a deep-voiced gentleman with a posh British accent who dryly comments on your evil deeds with lines like "your dungeon hearts beats stronger" and "the heroes flee in terror."

The genius of Dungeon Keeper is that it took the conventions of fantasy RPGs and inverted every single one. Treasure rooms are warehouses, not loot. Monsters are employees, not encounters. The dungeon you spent years exploring as a hero turns out to have been someone's small business, and that someone is now you, trying to make payroll while a paladin breaks down your front door.

If you have never played the original and you cannot get it running on modern hardware, War for the Overworld is the spiritual successor and it does the job. It even has the slap-the-imp mechanic, which is the kind of small detail that fans of the original will recognize as load bearing.

Overlord

Overlord is what happens when someone watches Lord of the Rings, gets to the part where the orcs swarm a fortress, and asks themselves "what if I was the orcs." You command minions, small goblin creatures color coded by element, and you stomp around a comedic fantasy world breaking peasant property and looting villages.

The minions are the heart of the game. Brown minions are melee, red minions are ranged and immune to fire, green minions are stealthy and immune to poison, blue minions can swim and resurrect their dead brothers. Each color has personality. They cackle. They squabble. They wear cooking pots as helmets. You spend half the game just watching your horde of idiots interact with the world while you point at things you want destroyed.

The sequel doubled down on the comedy and added co-op, which is exactly as fun as it sounds. Two overlords, two hordes, twice the property damage. There has not been a third Overlord game and I think about this with mild grief about once a year.

Evil Genius

Evil Genius is a Bond villain simulator. You build a secret base inside a hollowed out volcano. You hire henchmen with specific skills. You research doomsday devices. You send minions on heists across the globe to fund your operations. James Bond style super spies parachute onto your island and try to infiltrate the base, and you have to either capture them or kill them or in some cases trap them in elaborate Rube Goldberg style death machines that reduce their morale to zero.

The base building loop is the core of the game. You start with one corridor and a vault and slowly grow into a labyrinthine fortress with armories, training rooms, mess halls, interrogation chambers, and a giant satellite dish on the surface. The whole time you are managing global operations on a world map, sending agents to steal artifacts and silence witnesses.

Evil Genius 2 came out in 2021 and added more complexity, better graphics, and four playable masterminds. Some fans prefer the original because the original was scrappier and weirder. I like both. The fact that we got a sequel at all, after almost twenty years, is a minor miracle and I will not complain about whether the new one is better than the old one. They both let me build a volcano lair and that is what matters.

Boss Monster, the card game

Boss Monster is a card game from Brotherwise Games, released in 2013, where you play as the boss of a dungeon and try to lure adventurer cards into your rooms to kill them before they can reach your boss room and defeat you. It is structured like a side scrolling 8 bit RPG, with rooms laid left to right and adventurers moving through them turn by turn. Each room has a damage value and a treasure type that attracts certain hero classes. You build the dungeon to ambush specific adventurers based on what they want to loot.

The art is pure pixel nostalgia, the kind of style that pretends to be a lost NES game from 1989. The mechanics are tight. Games run twenty to thirty minutes. There are several expansions including a tools of the hero kingdom set and a paper and pixels expansion that adds new rooms, bosses, and mechanics. It also has an out of print Boss Monster Brutal expansion that goes for absurd money on eBay if you can find it.

Boss Monster the video game

In 2018 the card game got a video game adaptation, simply called Boss Monster, available on Steam and mobile. It captured the look and the rules of the tabletop game but added animations, online multiplayer, and a campaign mode. It was a competent translation. Not a revelation, but a faithful port that meant you could play the card game with friends across the country without having to ship cardboard.

I bring it up mostly because the existence of a card game video game adaptation about being the boss in your own dungeon, descended from a video game inspired by the experience of being a boss monster in old NES games, is a kind of perfect ouroboros. The boss monster fantasy is so foundational to gaming that it has now eaten itself.

Hand of Fate, where you are the dealer

Hand of Fate is the strangest entry on this list because the framing is so subtle. You sit at a table across from a hooded dealer who deals out a deck of cards that represent the rooms of a dungeon. You move a token from card to card. When you flip a card, the game shifts into third person action combat, you fight the encounter, then return to the table.

The dealer narrates the whole thing. He taunts you. He congratulates you. He builds the dungeon out of his deck and yours, and the deck building is half the game. You collect new cards as loot. You curate a deck for your next run.

What makes it a boss monster game is the late game reveal of who the dealer actually is. I will not spoil it because the framing is too good, but the answer reframes everything. You spend the whole game thinking you are the hero exploring a dungeon, and then you realize the dungeon was a person, and that person had reasons. The sequel, Hand of Fate 2, expands the system but never quite hits the same metaphysical note.

It is closer to a meta boss game than a literal one, but it earned its spot on this list by making me question who the protagonist really was the whole time.

Why playing the antagonist is satisfying

There is a specific psychological thing that happens when a game lets you be the bad guy and means it. Not the morally grey antihero. Not the rogue with a heart of gold. The actual antagonist, the thing the world has built itself around stopping. That role usually carries enormous power because antagonists in games are designed to be threats. When you take that role, all of that designed threat becomes your toolkit.

Heroes accumulate. They pick up potions, save them for later, manage inventories. Antagonists consume. Carrion eats. Plague Inc spreads. Dungeon Keeper hires and fires. The verbs change. The reward structure changes. Even the camera changes. Most boss fight cameras are framed to make the boss feel huge, and when you are the boss that framing is suddenly working in your favor.

There is also a comedy to it. The narrator in Dungeon Keeper. The peasants in Overlord screaming as your minions steal their cabbages. The Plague Inc news ticker reporting that your disease has been named "Steve" because the player named it Steve. Boss monster games often have a sense of humor about themselves that hero games rarely allow themselves.

If you want more of this energy in slightly different shapes, I wrote about the broader category of games where you are the villain which has some overlap with this list but covers some titles I left out here.

Why so few games do it

If boss monster games are this fun, why are there only about a dozen of them worth playing? A few reasons.

The first is narrative gravity. Most game stories want a redemption arc, or a sympathetic protagonist, or at least a morally legible reason to root for the player. Pure villainy is harder to write. It is easier to lean on horror or comedy as a protective layer, which is why the best villain games tend to be one or the other.

The second is mechanical. Hero games have decades of design conventions. Health bars, leveling, quest markers, all the muscle memory of how a player progresses through a world. Villain games often have to invent their own conventions because the existing ones do not fit. Plague Inc is not structured like any other game. Carrion is a Metroidvania that broke its own genre. Dungeon Keeper is not really an RTS or a sim, it is its own thing. Inventing genres is risky, and most studios do not have the budget or the appetite for that risk.

The third is identification. Marketing teams worry that players will not connect with a non human or evil protagonist. This is mostly wrong. Players love being sharks and bioweapons and dungeon owners. But the worry persists, and it shapes which projects get greenlit.

The result is a small but devoted catalog of games where you finally get to be the thing the heroes are afraid of. Each one feels like a discovery because each one had to invent itself from scratch.

What we are doing with Kaiju Protocol

This whole topic is on my mind because Kaiju Protocol, the game I am building right now, is in the boss monster lineage. You are the giant monster. The military is shooting at you with helicopters and tanks and main battle units, and your job is to crush them under your foot while you finish demolishing a city block. The framing is the same as Carrion or Plague Inc or Rampage. You are the antagonist. The destruction is the gameplay. The civilians scream in terror and that is the soundtrack to your power.

I keep coming back to the question of why this fantasy is so satisfying. I think part of it is that hero stories ask you to perform virtue. You have to make the right choice, save the right person, be the right kind of person. Boss monster games release you from all of that. The monster does not have to make moral choices. The monster just has to monster.

If you want to see how this plays out across other corners of the genre, the games like Rampage post covers more of the city smashing side of the spectrum, from arcade classics to the modern indie scene that keeps the genre alive.

Boss monster games are a small club but a great one. If you have not played Carrion, play Carrion. If you have not played Plague Inc, play Plague Inc. If you can find a working copy of the original Dungeon Keeper, fire it up, slap an imp, and remember when developers were brave enough to put you in charge of the dungeon instead of sending you in to clear it.