In the heady days of youth, once your homework was finished and you’d done your chores, it felt as though you could sit and play video games without a care in the world. The older you are, of course, the further away from this halcyon innocence you get. First studying for exams, then work and eventually family conspire to turn snatched moments joyously wasted in a game into a sordid, slightly guilty pleasure. It’s a sense of shame that gets worse the longer you spend, which makes vast, savagely addictive games such as Nioh (PS4) such a rich source of potential remorse.
Taking its cues from Dark Souls and Bloodborne, Nioh is a game of fighting and exploring in which your ninja inches his way through labyrinthine networks of corridors, staircases and chambers populated by increasingly lethal men and beasts. Each battle rewards you with dropped pieces of equipment that you wear to improve your chances of survival, which is important in a game where even lowly enemies can kill you if you’re not careful. The uncompromising difficulty level is ratcheted up further during encounters with bosses, who almost without exception seem impossible the first time you meet them, often dispatching you in a couple of strokes, forcing you to fight your way back to them over and over again – until you finally manage to finish them off. The painstaking masochism needed to progress makes hard-won success all the sweeter. And, like the games that inspired it, once it’s got its hooks into you, the real problem is trying to put down the controller at a reasonable hour so you don’t resemble one of its hollow-eyed wraiths in the morning.
Sniper Elite 4 (PS4, Xbox One, PC) provides a different kind of guilty pleasure. Once again, you’re an agent of death, but this time instead of swinging magic axes at monsters, you’re aiming precision rifles at human heads, something most of us would never dream of doing in real life. To help assuage any latent pangs of conscience, video games have three go-to classes of enemy that they think absolutely nobody could feel bad about killing: robots, zombies and Nazis in the second world war. Sniper Elite 4 goes for the last group, its gruesomely bloodthirsty kill-cam following the trajectory of your bullets and zooming in for closeup x-ray shots of exploding brain stems and rupturing internal organs. Things aren’t quite as straightforward as they seem, though, because once you’ve killed everyone and go about merrily looting their corpses, you start finding their letters home, often simply written and direct but also occasionally desperate and poignant. It’s an interesting counterpoint to the bombast and horror-porn in a game that’s hugely entertaining but doesn’t always want you to feel satisfied with that.
The final part of the holy trinity of game-related self-reproach is money. Paying £50 per game for the privilege of gawping slack-jawed and sweaty-palmed at your TV may appear to be the epitome of irresponsibility, but that’s child’s play compared with buying new consoles. We previewed it last month, but this month sees the UK release of the painfully tempting Nintendo Switch (£280), which lets you play games at home, on the bus or, if you like to live dangerously, in the bath. It also lets you prop the console up on a table anywhere you fancy to play against your chums, although an extra pair of joycons – Nintendo’s very pretty miniature controllers – will set you back another regret-inducing £70.
You’ll also want to set aside enough to buy The Legend Of Zelda: Breath Of The Wild (Switch, Wii U), which expands Nintendo’s perennial adventure series into an enormous open world, letting you roam free, discovering hidden ruins, exploring shrines and stealthily laying waste to enemy encampments in its delightfully rendered wilderness. It’s an instant classic.
The apotheosis of this line of reasoning, bringing together entertainment and compunction, is probably, I’d suggest, some sort of Nintendo Switch-based Super Guilt Fighter game, in which you and up to three friends undertake social activities while trying not to stare aimlessly at the brightly coloured moving images on the screen. It’s a concept that may need additional work before final release, but I’m ready for it. Nintendo, you can reach me via the Guardian. Nintendo?
