The Cutprice Guignol

Sometimes, when I need to kick back and relax, I like to cast my eyes over all things Sims – especially the Sims games I grew up with. While I am a Sims 2 girl at heart, I did play the Sims 3, and, as a result, I too have been cursed with the knowledge of Katy Perry’s Sweet Treats Stuff Pack.

Sweet Treats was released as in 2012, and soon gained a notorious place amongst the Sims fandom (hey, you should watch Lazy Game Reviews video on it, perhaps!) for being one of those blatant cash-ins of the entire franchise to date. Capitalizing on Perry’s candy-striped, eye-poppingly stylized persona and style at the time and costing more than twice as much as normal stuff packs in some markets, so much of the content was deemed silly, impractical, or basically unusable. It was officially retired as a pack by EA just over a year after it came out, left to rot in the annals of Bad Sims Ideas along with re-writing the entire timeline of the game’s story in the foruth iteration.

But I’m not here to rag on Sims 4! No, I want to take a look back at Sweet Treats and observe the horror that was this stuff pack in it’s full glory. Let’s get into it!

I mean, from the off, the marketing material for this pack always makes me lose it. “Packed with more stuff than you have ever seen“, it declares, and I get that it probably refers to having the most new stuff for a stuff pack for The Sims 3, but the way it reads sends me; these fifty-five objects and thirty-three outfits are more than you have ever seen. Madam, I saw more in the family-size bag of M&Ms I stress-ate last night watching Wolf Hall. It’s still not worth the price.

But then, the stuff really is more than I’ve ever seen, and I don’t mean that in a good way. Let’s peruse some of the finest furnituerial offerings from this pack, shall we?

Just to give you the vibe of what we’re dealing with here, let’s take a look at this image from the release trailer. And I mean take a look at it. That wallpaper that starts to spell out the date of your death in the dots if you look at it for too long; that guitar that is shaped like, and I say this after a good ten minutes of staring, God knows what, the completely normal mirror that somehow looks like the most insane thing against this backdrop.

The cupcake chairs are meant to look like they’ve got cherries on top, I think, but the bizarre swatches around the top make them look like they’re sentient beings wearing bobble hats and enjoying the guitar music politely. The rancid colour palette on the rug blazed out my retinas like the Rapture, and the mural on the end of the bed is giving 2003 bootleg online My Little Pony baking minigame in it’s entirety. The ceiling looks weirdly like a floor with a rug on it in reverse, which leads me to believe this must have been shot in the Red Lodge.

That lollipop lamp with a face on it? Something out of a Junjo Ito story. Imagine flicking this thing on in the middle of the night to light your way to the bathroom, you’d feel like you were about to face the wall at the end of The Blair With Project. I would leave someone’s house if they had this heart lamp in it, but I might be convinced back if they showed me an ice-cream wall-mount sconce light, like something out of an imposing Medieval castle owned by Ben & Jerry.

On to the outdoor items. Firstly, we need to address the cotton candy trees, because they unsettle me in a deep, visceral way, like a cat with human teeth or something. It looks like a stressful blend of pubic hair and a spiderweb, and the squint candycane stem on one of them is just the perfect level of clash to make me feel a bit ill.

I do not know how I feel about the fountain; the rabbit looks like a bootleg emoji, but the cake decoration on the body of it is actually kind of cute. The oddly realistic and huge ice cream statue is a hard yes; for the sake of my sanity, I cannot acknowledge the reflective circle tree.

Do the candy cane swirls on this playset look like pepperoni to anyone else? And why did the designers go for such an objectively terrifying gingerbread man design? Why do they look like the bodies of Sweet Treats dissenters who’ve been strung up as a warning to others? Is this a threat?

I would have this candy-striped doorway as the entrance to my John Kramer-style torture chamber. The porthole wrapped candy window is kind of great, though. I would put that in my torture chamber too, as a little treat for myself.

But, of course, we have to get into the clothes. Now, loathe as I am to say it, some of the outfits are kind of a serve (pun intended). This cupcake dress is better than about thirty percent of stuff I saw on the red carpet at that one Met Gala where they had camp as a theme, and the candy hat is the sort of thing I could see some painfully ironic fashion designer perching atop the heads of his more disaffected models.

As a woman who loves women and also doesn’t know when to fucking stop when it comes to fashion, I felt really seen by this outfit, which prominently displays the lesbian pride flag colours on the skirt, and just plasters whatever the fuck on the bodice on top. That ice cream wonkily slapped over one tit is me putting on another ugly scarf when I’m already wearing three, spiritually.

Of the thirty-three outfits, this is the only one male Sims got, and if this isn’t a Drag Race confessional look, I don’t know what is. I would wear these trousers and get the absolute fuck roasted out of me by all my friends, though, so fair play to them.

There’s so much more to this pack, and, honestly, while I do think it is a blatant cash-in, it’s clear that the designers really understood Katy Perry’s aesthetic and did their best to capture it in a Sims-compatible way (whether or not that worked). What do you think of this pack, looking back? Did you get it when it came out? How do you think it holds up? Let me know in the comments!

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