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What are your favourite guilty pleasure games?Ronzilla Asks RPS
Ronzilla Asks RPS
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun
Cor, has it really been almost half a year since we’ve done one of these? Apologies, readers. I honestly don’t know where the time goes. It’s probably because we’re spending too much time with our favourite guilty pleasure games, which is the subject of this latestAsk RPScolumn.
The question comes courtesy of ronzilla, who asked:What were your favourite guilty pleasure games of 2022? As in, I play this all the time and I’m semi-embarrassed to admit it?
A good question! In canvassing the wider RPS Treehouse for their responses, it quickly became clear that most of our guilty pleasure games extend way beyond the bounds of just the year 2022, so we’ve answered a bit more broadly than the original question perhaps intended. Still, hopefully there are still some entertaining answers in here nonetheless.
To see this content please enable targeting cookies.Manage cookie settingsKatharine recently played four hours of Assassin’s Creed Mirage and, yep, it’s certainly a classic Assassin’s Creed game.Watch on YouTube
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Liam:Christ, how long do you have? I played about a 100 hours ofFortnitelast year alone. I logged into Mario Kart Tour every single day. I bought currency forOverwatch 2. Multiple times! Why did I do that?Sonic Frontierswould have been a fun answer to this question, as I think I’m the only person in the team (the network? The country? The world??) that liked it, but I’d be lying if I said I’d even booted it up once in 2023.Vampire Survivorsis probably a better answer, as although it’s a fantastic game, my mission to unlock every single one of its achievements has resulted in a playtime over 85 hours which is a bit gross really.
Ollie:Oh, come on. You expect me to remember 2022? I suppose I did play throughMarvel’s Spider-Man, but the only thing I’m embarrassed about with that is that it took me so long to play it. “Oh, the web-swinging is quite good, isn’t it?” I said, five years too late. Besides that, I believe I played a fair bit ofTower Of Fantasy, and while I didn’t exactly enjoy it, it proved to be a good enough onboarding experience for the genre that I could finally go back intoGenshin Impactand not bounce off it like the first couple of times I’d tried it out. Yeah, I guess probablyGenshin Impactis the correct answer here. But I’m not exactly embarrassed. I’m more just proud that I got so much out of the game without ever giving in and spending so much as a penny on the “give me all the pretty characters” slot machine.
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Focus Entertainment/4Divinity
James:Yeah, tough one. I feel guilty about how excessively competitive I became playingApex Legends, but not for playing the game per se. I think the closest I’ve come to this was maybeAtomic Heart, earlier this year? Its frequent lapses into terribleness (hateful characters, baffling world design, questionable politics) definitely made me quieten down to others about how fun I was having with the moment-to-moment robot blasting.
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Ubisoft
Katharine:I think the best answer I have for this is: any Assassin’s Creed game. I have logged stupid numbers of hours playing bothOdysseyandValhallaover the last five years, and I honestly don’t know why I kept playing them for so long. They are entirely hollow video games, with rinse-repeat tasks, the same kind of nothing castle raiding and auto-climbing parkour, andyet. Even though I know they’re trash, they’re also thebest kindof trash. I don’t care one jot for the wider AC lore hole. I don’t really even consider myself a “fan” of the series. But will I keep playing the heck out of them withevery subsequent release? Hoo boy, absolutely yes I will.
Alice Bee:I don’t consider any of my pleasures that guilty to be honest! At least not in the sense that I’m embarrassed to admit I play it. I mean I don’t play any anime girl sex games, I suppose, and if I did maybe my feelings re: shame would be different. But in general I think if something makes you happy and it’s not hurting your or others then why feel guilty? I do have a Picross game on my phone that I loghoursin, almost every day. It’s called CrossMe and every so often it updates with new puzzles, and a lot of the images are of dubious origin. I did one puzzle the other day that was theSkyrimlogo and it was called ‘Dragon Picture’ or something. So I get guilty about that in the sense that I use it like a fidget spinner, essentially, but the cumulative time spent playing it could be more profitably spent on e.g. reading a book. Genuinely my most played game of basically any year.
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Blobfish
Alice0:Like Alice, I don’t believe in having “guilty pleasures”. I will openly and joyously admit to everything I play, read, watch, and listen to - especially the trash. To act like some games are beneath you is to intentionally ignore the full and sometimes terrible power of video games. There’s huge power in something which can satisfy a need or scratch an itch deep in you yet provoke a reaction of guilt or shame, and that’s worth giving real thought. So to go along with the spirit of the question, I will say that I recently needed to uninstallBrotatobecause it was becoming a genuine problem for my life.
