CARRION, UNTITLED GOOSE GAME, AND PLAYING THE OTHER SIDE

The best laugh I've had playing a video game in the last five years came from stealing a gardener's sun hat. Not as a cat burglar or a fantasy rogue. As a goose. A flat polygonal waddling goose with no expression and the wrong number of neck vertebrae. I picked the hat up with my flat rubber beak, honked once, and ran. The gardener chased me. I dropped the hat in a pond. The hat sank. The game congratulated me with a gentle checkbox.

It was so stupid that it looped back into genius. And thinking about why it worked sent me down a rabbit hole of every game I've played that pulls the same trick. Games where the camera is sitting behind the thing the game would normally cast as the problem. Carrion, where you're the lab experiment that got loose. Untitled Goose Game, where you're the menace of a small English village. Plague Inc, where you're literally a disease. Dungeon Keeper, where you're the thing at the bottom of the dungeon the adventurers are trying to kill.

There's something specific happening in each of these games that I want to pick apart, because once you notice the pattern you start seeing how few studios are actually willing to make these things. And I think that's a shame. Being the other side is one of the most interesting corners of game design, and nobody's mining it nearly hard enough.

The trick these games are all pulling

Most games cast you as the force of restoration. The kingdom is in trouble, you fix it. The zombies are coming, you shoot them. The princess is kidnapped, you get her back. The default posture of a video game protagonist is reactive. Something is wrong with the world and your job is to push it back toward normal.

Antagonist games flip that. You are not restoring anything. You are disrupting. Your win condition is the thing the NPCs are running scripts to prevent. And because game design is basically the art of giving players interesting problems to solve, there is a whole secondary layer of design work that happens when you make the player the antagonist. The counter-play has to come from somewhere. The NPCs have to be smart enough to make your job hard. The world has to have a default state that you are trying to derail.

This is harder to design than a hero game. In a hero game the world starts broken and the player's actions push it toward a better state. In an antagonist game the world starts working fine and the player's actions have to visibly break it. You need scripts for the NPCs to notice the damage, scripts for them to respond, scripts for them to adapt. The whole simulation has to be alive in a way that doesn't have to be true when the player is the hero, because in a hero game the enemies only exist to be killed.

When you pull it off, though, you get a specific flavor of fun that nothing else produces.

Carrion and the inverted Metroidvania

Carrion is the cleanest expression of this idea in modern gaming. You are a red biomass with teeth and tendrils that has escaped from a research facility, and the entire game is a Metroidvania built around you being the thing the scientists used to study. Every room is a set piece where humans react to your presence and try to kill you. You flow through vents, smash grates, grab people off catwalks, and generally act like the creature in every horror movie the devs watched growing up.

What makes Carrion work as a design piece is that the designers understood the inversion all the way down. In a normal Metroidvania you get power ups that let you reach new areas. A double jump. A wall climb. A grappling hook. Your inventory grows as the game goes on. In Carrion your powers are tied to your size. You get bigger by eating, smaller by shedding mass, and your abilities change based on which body configuration you're currently in. Tight vents need a small you. Big combat arenas need a big you. The game has pools around the map where you can store or retrieve biomass, and navigating the map is partly about knowing which form you need to be when you arrive.

That mechanic only works because you're the monster. You can't sell that system to a hero. It has no metaphorical weight if you're a person. But if you're a creature made of meat, the meat BEING your upgrade system is obvious and thematic and beautiful.

Carrion also gets the pacing right. The humans scream when they see you. The radio chatter gets more frantic as you work through a facility. The soldiers get better equipment the further you progress. You feel the institution bracing for you, and then you tear through it anyway. By the end you are climbing up to the sky, unmistakably the thing that should never have existed, and the game has zero interest in apologizing for that.

Untitled Goose Game and the puzzle of being annoying

Untitled Goose Game does the inversion in a completely different register. You're not scary. You're annoying. You're not killing anyone. You're stealing a kid's glasses so he can't read. You're not escaping a lab. You're waddling through a village designed by someone with a PhD in comedy timing.

The design insight in Goose Game is that the verbs of an antagonist can be tiny. Honk. Grab. Flap. Those are basically it. But when every NPC in the world is running a full routine with things they care about and places they need to be, those tiny verbs become the components of a perfectly crafted comedy sketch. You honk next to a man holding a radio and he drops the radio into a pond. You grab a rake and the gardener chases you to get it back. You stretch your neck through a fence and steal a sandwich off a picnic blanket.

House House, the studio that made Goose Game, understood that the joy of being the antagonist scales with how much the world is pretending you're not supposed to be there. The gardener is trying to garden. The pub owner is trying to run a pub. The kid is trying to play with his toys. You are a goose. Nobody invited you. Every successful bit of mischief feels like you're pulling off a heist against the concept of a normal Tuesday afternoon.

The game also refuses to give you combat. You cannot hurt anybody. The worst thing a goose can do is embarrass a man into chasing it around a fountain. That restraint is what makes the game feel so clean. There's no moral weight because you're not actually harming the village, you're just inconveniencing it. The comedy would collapse if you had teeth.

Plague Inc and the villain with no avatar

Plague Inc is the furthest out on the spectrum, because your character isn't a body at all. You are a disease. You don't move through the world. You spread across it. You don't kill people one at a time. You kill them by the billion.

What Plague Inc gets right is that an antagonist game needs counter-play. The humans are not sitting there waiting to die. The WHO, the CDC, various national governments, and independent research labs are all running scripts in the background to find you, study you, and cure you. News tickers scroll across the screen. Borders close. Quarantines go up. Greenland, famously, will close its ports the second it catches wind of anything weird, and if your disease isn't in Greenland by that point, Greenland is going to be the last human settlement on Earth and you're going to lose.

The interesting design move is that Plague Inc rewards patience. A bad player turns their disease lethal too early. The symptoms flag, the cure ships, and the game ends with six hundred million survivors. A good player spreads quietly for as long as possible, lets the disease infect every island nation and every remote research station, and only flips to lethal once the whole planet is saturated. The fun is in the timing. The fun is in imagining the newsrooms slowly realizing something is wrong.

I think what Plague Inc proves is that the antagonist doesn't need to be a character. The PLAYER is the character. The disease is just a tool. You're the mind behind it, the thing making the decisions, and the fantasy the game is selling is less "be the virus" and more "outwit the entire human species." That's a different power fantasy than any hero game can offer.

Dungeon Keeper and the building you used to raid

Dungeon Keeper is the oldest entry on this list, and still one of the best. You're the dungeon. Not a character in the dungeon. The dungeon itself. Your imps dig tunnels. Your monsters move into the rooms you build for them. Your traps go in the corridors where adventurers will walk. And then the adventurers come, and you watch them die to the systems you constructed, and you feel exactly the way the villain in a fantasy movie feels when the heroes fall into the pit they didn't see coming.

The design work in Dungeon Keeper is the role inversion of a real time strategy game. Every RTS up to that point had you as the generic good kingdom fighting the generic bad orc horde. Peter Molyneux and Bullfrog looked at that formula and just asked what if you were the orc horde. What if your economy was based on gold mined by imps. What if your military was made of horned reapers and mistresses and bile demons. What if your PR department was a hand floating out of the ceiling that slapped lazy workers.

There's a direct line from Dungeon Keeper to every modern game that has you defending a base against waves of enemies, but the original is still the most committed to the fantasy. The narrator calls you a malevolent force. The heroes are incompetent nuisances. The spells are all evil. The research tree is all evil. It is, structurally, an evil simulator, and it's funnier and tighter than most games that came after it.

If you want more recommendations in this space there's a whole post over at games where you are the villain that goes deeper on the genre. Worth a read if this angle appeals to you.

Why playing the other side is so refreshing

I've thought a lot about why these games scratch an itch that hero games can't, and I think it comes down to three things.

The first is surprise. Hero narratives are so ubiquitous in games that they've become invisible. Load a new RPG, you know you're saving the world. Load a new shooter, you know you're shooting the bad guys. The opening hour of any big release is just the game walking you through why your character, specifically, has to be the one to fix things. When the framing flips, even slightly, your brain suddenly has to pay attention again. You have to re-learn what's good and what's bad, what counts as progress, what the win condition even looks like. That re-learning is, by itself, fun.

The second is the mechanical freshness that comes from role inversion. Carrion's mass-based power system can only exist because you're a monster. Goose Game's verb set can only be small because you're a goose. Plague Inc's patience-reward loop only works because you're a disease with no physical body. Dungeon Keeper's dungeon-as-base only works because the dungeon is you. When designers invert the role, they often end up with mechanical inventions that a hero game couldn't support. The role-flip creates the design space.

The third is catharsis. Not the dark catharsis of hurting people, but the lighter catharsis of pushing against a world that normally pushes back. Most of adult life is about being the responsible party. You pay your bills, you show up to meetings, you behave at parties. Hero games extend that into leisure time. You're saving the kingdom. You're responsible for the outcome. Antagonist games give you a little window where the responsibility evaporates. You're a goose. The village will be fine after you leave. Go honk at somebody.

What studios could learn from this

I wish more studios were willing to try this. The back catalog of antagonist games is weirdly small given how well they do when they ship. Carrion sold out its Switch run almost instantly. Goose Game became a meme and a bestseller. Plague Inc became a mobile franchise and then a board game and then, awkwardly, a news story during 2020. Dungeon Keeper has a devoted enough fanbase that two different modern studios are still making spiritual successors. These are not niche games. They just look niche because so few studios have the nerve to make one.

Part of the problem, I think, is that publishing is risk averse and antagonist games sound risky. It's easier to pitch a dragon-slaying RPG than it is to pitch "you are the dragon and the villagers are running real time economic simulations trying to starve you out." The dragon game is a known quantity. The dragon simulator is a weird experiment.

But the weird experiments are where the memorable games come from. Nobody remembers the seventeenth generic fantasy RPG from 2018. Everybody remembers the goose.

If I could give one piece of advice to any studio sitting on a pitch meeting it would be to let yourself cast the player as the problem. Not for the whole game necessarily. Maybe just for a level. Maybe just for a section. Let the player be the thing the world is scared of, and see what happens to your mechanics when you do. My bet is that you'll find design space you didn't know was there, and the team will have more fun making it than they've had in years.

The goose made me laugh on a Tuesday

I'll close on the goose. I was having a bad week. Deadline I was behind on, a router that kept dying, a sense that everything I owned was wasting my time. I booted up Untitled Goose Game because a friend had been yelling at me about it for months. Forty minutes later I was cackling at my monitor because I had successfully stolen a gardener's lunch and hidden it in a well.

That's what these games do. They let you be the problem for a little while. And every so often, after a week of being the one who fixes problems, being the problem is the most satisfying thing in the world.