Evil Detecting Dog / Video Games

• Assassin's Creed:
  • A not-quite-evil-detecting example: in Assassin's Creed III, the British's dogs may start barking at you and grab the owner's attention, even if you haven't done anything "wrong" in front of it.
  • The ending of Assassin's Creed: Mirage where Basim's loyal bird Enkidu scratches him across the face when he tries to call it to land on his arm because Enkidu recognizes that the kind-hearted Basim it knew has been permanently and negatively warped by his malevolent former identity as Loki.
• From the Command & Conquer: Red Alert Series:
  • In the first two games, attack dogs are a soviet unit that can detect spies that can fool any other unit and your base defenses. The allies also began to use them in the second game.
  • In the third game the dogs still use by allies force while the soviets one ups this by replacing them with armored war bears.
  • In Red Alert 3: Paradox, you need to use each faction's animal scout unit to detect stealth units, which is not only limited to Evil Detecting Dogs but Evil Detecting Bears, Hawks, Tigers, Sharks, and Giant Robot Crabs too.
• Dragon Age has Mabari warhounds — extremely intelligent animals capable of understanding human speech. As a general rule, they have this going on, since you can only get a Mabari to agree to be your pet if it decides you are a sufficiently good person. The Mabari were bred by a wizard to bolster the forces of Tevinter, but according to legend, the dogs changed sides when they met the much kinder Fereldan natives; they have been the symbol of the country ever since. It's also stated that the reason Mabari originally became so popular in Ferelden was because they can detect werewolves.
  • Dragon Age: Origins has several examples, but they're only seen if your faithful Mabari warhound is in the active party:
    • In the Human Noble origin (the only one where you have Dog from the very beginning), Dog is introduced as having figured out that there are large and rather dangerous rats in the castle larder. Later, his barking is what alerts the PC to the fact that the family castle is being invaded.
    • In the Stone Prisoner DLC, Dog will immediately sense that "Kitty" is something powerful and evil and that's before the ominous glowing eyes and ominous demonic voice come into play.
    • In the "Nature of the Beast" quest, Dog's hostility towards Zathrian serves as an indication that he's not the most trustworthy fellow.
    • In the Warden's Keep DLC, Dog will immediately sense the demon possessing Sophia Dryden.
    • During the "Sacred Ashes" quest, Dog licks an ominous desk covered in blood, and starts to growl at it, noting that something is not good within Haven. He's right, of course; the place is home to an evil dragon-worshiping cult.
    • Inverted with Dog being reserved and occasionally hostile to Alistair, yet affectionate toward Morrigan. (Alistair isn't a bad guy at all — quite the opposite; Dog just doesn't like him because he's made too many jokes about taking Dog's food.)
  • If the Black Emporium DLC is installed for Dragon Age II, Hawke can express a preference for their Mabari to stay with their mother Leandra at all times, because his strength and evil-detecting abilities offer her excellent protection. Later, the dog has a brief scene in which he successfully captures a would-be thief in Hawke's closet.
  • There's no Mabari for the Inquisitor in Dragon Age: Inquisition, with the in-game explanation being that, unlike the Warden and Hawke, the Inquisitor is not from Ferelden (and Mabari are pretty much exclusively Fereldan). However, it's been speculated that it was really for precisely this reason — a Mabari would likely have been able to determine that one specific character was not what he was claiming to be.
• The Escapists 2 features these. Dogs can detect and sniff out contraband^note the latter will raise your heat to 100% but will not attack unless there is a lockdown.
• Fallen London: The Bishop of Southwark wants you to breed one of these, the fabled "Hound of Heaven", to root out devils in the Labyrinth of Tigers. Despite the Bishop's repeated admonition of "no serpents!", the Hound turns out to be just that — a glowing white snake with evil-detecting red eyes.
• Works awesomely well in Fallout: New Vegas: in one of the final missions of the game, if you think to take your robo-dog Rex with you as a companion, he will detect a Legion assassin in disguise without you having to search for him. Subverted since you discover he was once a Legion-owned dog, being the companion of Caesar himself, making this arguably more of a They Have the Scent!. Played straight if you have the Animal Friend perk and use a lender-dog to do the same thing. Faction-owned guard dogs are also able to see through the player's disguises.
• In Fate/Grand Order, the Shinjuku chapter features the protagonist thrown into a Wretched Hive, and even their allies for this chapter have canonically Evil alignments. The All-Loving Hero protagonist soon befriends a dog who acts as a barometer on how "good" an ally is despite their alignment and temperament. One of their first allies is Altria Alter, who basically adopts the dog and names it Cavall II, and she sticks to the party through thick and thin as one of the main allies despite her protests otherwise. Meanwhile, their first ally Archer of Shinjuku gets mildly harassed by Cavall throughout the chapter, and Hassan of the Cursed Arm gets outright growled at. Per the trope, the latter is revealed in the cutscene right afterward as the cruelly antagonistic Assassin of Shinjuku in disguise, while Archer has been suspicious since the beginning even after revealing he's the "good" counterpart to the true villain. And at the end of Shinjuku... Well, he's the bad guy after all, but his spot of goodness ends up foiling his plan.
• In Final Fantasy VII, in the flashback to when Tifa found Cloud lying unconscious in the train station, a dog is barking at him, trying to revive him and even running to Tifa to get her to help him. It stays friendly with Cloud until Cloud's SOLDIER persona is fully in place, at which point the dog runs a distance and turns around to bark at Cloud aggressively, able to tell that he's suddenly changed into something else.
• In Geist, dogs can sense you as a ghost, and know something is up when you're possessing somebody. The Big Bad knows this and exploits this, keeping dogs at various checkpoints to make sure you don't escape through a soldier. You can't escape in ghost form, due to energy shields that only let solid matter pass through.
• At the beginning of Guenevere, Guen gets a fae pet (either a cat or a dog) who has a preternatural sense for those trying to do his mistress harm and is willing to act on such feelings immediately and violently.
• Played with in the final case of Gyakuten Kenji 2. Simon Keyes is The Beastmaster for the Berry Big Circus, a meek Nervous Wreck of a guy with a gentle demeanor who's great with all the animals — until he finally drops his nice guy act and reveals himself as The Chessmaster who orchestrated all the crimes you've spent the entire game solving. After you finally prove that he's guilty of murder, instigating murder, and kidnapping, and he has nowhere left to run, the ringmaster Regina tells Simon that the animals have seen his true colors and are very, very angry at him as all sorts of growls, roars, and rumbles are heard from the cages. His final breakdown is him getting a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown from his former animal friends, including birds, a monkey, a cat, chipmunks, a gorilla, and an elephant.
• Hewie from Haunting Ground barks at hidden traps and other unseen dangers, allowing the mostly helpless Fiona to work around the many perils of Belli Castle.
• Haunting Starring Polterguy: The family's dog (a very ugly chihuahua) can detect poltergeist Polterguy and will bark at him to make his gauge of ectoplasma drop. He also can calm down the family members so you have to scare them again. The only thing Polterguy can do against the dog is using a magic spell (found in the underworld) to give him food. He will turn into the final boss by the end.
• Despite disguises, dogs in the Hitman series will often, if not always, sniff Agent 47 out.
  • Dogs are some of the most annoying Non Player Characters in the game, and not just because they can sniff you out. Dogs count as witnesses if you kill someone in front of them, so inexperienced players may get tripped up by them. Also, since it would've been too hard to create an animation model of 47 dragging them around, you can't dispose of dog bodies, making it harder to go undetected.
• In Hollow Knight, the Grimmchild acts as a companion that spits fireballs at any enemies in sight, but leaves shopkeepers and other non-hostile NPCs alone. The only exception to this is Millibelle the Banker, who gets spat on with fireballs as well, and hides in her shell until you unequip the Grimmchild charm. This is foreshadowing to the fact that the bank is an elaborate scam; if you deposit enough Geo into your account, Millibelle will take the money and run.
• Hungry Lamu: ochi tried to protect the campers from Lamu, who is a human-faced llama serial killer, and acts hostile towards his presence which he interpreted as her refusing to be eaten and being "rude". Sadly, the emphasis on tried, as Lamu kills her with a rock.
• The Legend of Zelda:
  • The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask: During the defense of Romani's barn, the dog will bark in the direction of the closest of "Them" for Link to go after first.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild: Link can purchase the "Dark set" of armor that will make him look like Dark Link. Regular NPCs will freak out upon seeing him in this shadowy outfit, even those who are close friends of his. Hylian Retrievers, on the other hand, will not freak out and will react happily to him giving them food, spinning in circles, etc., just as they would when he wears other outfits. This game also adds Wolf Link as a companion summoned through amiibo, who can detect camouflaged Lizalfos and enemies hidden in the player's field of vision.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom has two examples:
    • Steward constructs, which were created by the Zonai in ages past, can detect malicious creatures and people and will assume a protective stance when such threats are around. One particular instance has a steward cowering in fear near a banana inside an otherwise empty room. Because that banana is a trap that summons a Yiga footsoldier if picked up.
    • Sometime before the start of the game, Zelda got herself a new horse as a mount. In the game proper, a stablehand charged with taking care of said horse recalls how the princess came to visit the horse, but it panicked and ran away from her, which the stablehand found perplexing as Zelda has been nothing but kind to it. Unbeknownst to regular humans, that "Zelda" is Ganondorf's servant who assumes a Zelda disguise to sow troubles across the land, and the horse can tell it's not actually her.
• Life Is Strange: In a weird case, the local drug dealer's dog acts like this. Should Max tell Frank Bowers that Nathan's Accidental Murder of Frank's girlfriend Rachel he recalls that Pompidou hated Nathan and berates himself for not trusting his dog's instinct.
• Long Live the Queen: You can get an important clue if your Dogs skill (under Animal Handling) is high enough. The dog barks at the scent of poisoned chocolate, saving Elodie from assassination.
• In Love & Pies, Amelia's new dog barks at the door and runs away whenever Edwina, the owner of Global Corp Clean Bean Café and Amelia's competitor, drops by her café. It also growls at Joe when he returns from the baker's retreat earlier than expected because it doesn't like his new beard, and Kate agrees. This is because it's actually his twin brother Sam masquerading as him.
• Luck be a Landlord: As part of the "Billionaires have no souls" theme, Dog symbols give 2 extra coins if next to any human symbol in the game, including Hooligans, Thieves, Ninjas, and even Cultists, with the sole exception of the Billionaire symbol.
• Mega Man Legends: A local dog knows that Tron Bonne (a Pirate Girl) is up to no good.
• Metal Gear:
  • In Metal Gear Solid, Sniper Wolf's wolf-dogs are not fooled even by your Optic Camouflage. The only way to get past them without hassle is to have one of the puppies piss on your cardboard box, or to have Wolf's handkerchief equipped.
  • Not exactly evil-detecting, but at one point in Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater you need to put on an enemy uniform and mask to infiltrate a base. Scientists, guards, and security cameras take you for the real deal and don't raise alarms. But you don't smell like the officer you're impersonating, and guard dogs will still raise alerts.
  • Used symbolically in the opening cutscenes of Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes when the Camp Omega guard dogs are barking furiously and lunging at Skullface and need to be held back by their handlers. While it's clearly because they, as guard dogs, simply don't recognize him as one of the camp's personnel, it also makes it very clear this guy is bad news and means to cause some serious damage. Oh boy are they right.
  • Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain has a very straightforward example in the form of Big Boss' loyal pet D-Dog, who has the ability to sense and bark at the presence of any nearby enemy soldiers (and also prisoners-of-war, wild animals, various objects such as weapons and vehicles, etc.); conveniently producing onscreen markers for the player to find them.
• The trope is discussed in Mortal Kombat 11, during a pre-fight dialogue exchange between Terminator and Kotal Kahn.
  Kotal Kahn: Barking dogs heralded your arrival.
  Terminator: They can smell the chemicals in my skin.
  Kotal Kahn: Helpful, indeed...
• In Mother 3, Lucas, Kumatora and Duster eat some unusual mushrooms while desperate for food. The mushrooms cause them to hallucinate that the monsters in the area are characters from their pasts. The party dog, Boney, is the only one not fooled, and whines and barks when the hallucinations begin to talk to the characters, attempting to warn the rest of the party as to their true nature. He also refuses to get into a beautiful sauna the party can rest in — if you visit it again after the effects of the mushrooms have worn off, you'll find the humans were deliriously bathing in toxic sludge.
• A literal case in NetHack, where your pet (typically a dog) will hesitate to step on cursed items.
• Inverted in the Oddworld series. Slogs, the villains' guard dogs, can sometimes detect when the player has possessed a slig and will attack him as viciously as they would you.
• In Ōkami, Amaterasu is a goddess taking the form of a white wolf. She's often seen preemptively reacting to threats before they appear onscreen. While Issun can usually also feel when a particular place has a bad vibe, there is one particular scene where this trope is played straightest: when Amaterasu comes across a dead Queen Himiko and finds Rao also present and claiming to have witnessed the queen being attacked by a demon, Ammy immediately realizes that Rao is not who she says she is and attacks her. Issun thinks Ammy has gone crazy until "Rao" lets out an Evil Laugh.
• Koromaru in Persona 3. He's the first indication that non-humans can have a Persona (his, appropriately, is Cerberus). Taken to its natural conclusion in Persona Q2: New Cinema Labyrinth, where he catches on to Goro Akechi quickly. (Probably due to realizing how similar he is to Ken). Unlike most examples, however, he latches onto them because he wants to help them overcome their hatred rather than point them out.
• In Pokemon Heart Gold And Soul Silver, your Pokémon will react negatively to the Persian Statues (which are actually security cameras) while inside the Rocket Hideout.
• In Robopon, this is inverted. The dog is evil or at least under the care of villains, and growls at Cody when he approaches.
• Brown from Rule of Rose works very much like Hewie and can detect and bark at enemies long before Jennifer (or the player) can see them. He can also sniff out items though these aren't exactly "evil".
• When you first enter the main city in Shining the Holy Ark you see one of the villains walking around. A cute little puppy starts barking like crazy at her, then a flash of light blinds you; when you can see again, she's gone and so is the puppy, leaving a crying child.
• In The Sims 3, cats and dogs will "investigate the strange sim" if there is a vampire nearby and there will be a talk bubble on their head with a picture of bats.
• In Snatcher, it's commonly believed that animals can detect Snatchers, to the point where genetically engineered "Pocket Pets", which can be used as purses, are becoming extremely popular.
• In Super Paper Mario, there is a large guard dog-esque monster in Merlee's mansion who is chained up. When released, he runs past Mario and chases off the mansion's maid, who is actually one of the Big Bad's minions, the shapeshifting Mimi.
• Used in Super Robot Wars Advance. The pet dog from Zambot 3 is able to detect that something is kinda off to the protagonists, who's actually a Shadow Mirror spy. Axel gets a typical bark, but the dog barks louder to Lamia, who is actually a Robot Girl.
• Parodied in Kagetsu Tohya. Shiki learns that a black cat (Len) frequents the Tohno mansion courtyard, but only lets Hisui approach it, and he wryly comments that animals really can sense dangerous people. Akiha and Kohaku are decidedly not amused...
• Some enemies in World of Warcraft have watchdogs that can see through stealth.
  • Hunter pets will also occasionally stop dead in their tracks if they detect a stealthed hostile mob or player. One of the many reasons for a Hunter to learn to keep an eye on their pet.
  • The warlock pet Felhunter (bascially a demon dog) used to provide his allies with increased stealth detection. These days, the Voidwalker instead does something similiar while he uses his selfhealing ability Consume Shadows.
• Yomawari: Lost in the Dark: In the shopping district level, dogs will stand outside and bark at the red barriers that block your path. If you go into the red barriers, you die.
• Yomawari: Midnight Shadows: Yui's dog Chaco barks away any spirits that try to harm her or Haru. You can take Chaco with you in the post-game and they can scare away certain spirits.

---