I feel like, at that point, why even mention the first bit? Just play the game and cope with your guilt in your own time. You're not getting a cookie for being conflicted.
Because the reality is there is no such thing as "games journalism". It's an advertising business, and you don't get to pay the bills if you run it like one.
I've seen a rag run an entire headline story about how the director of a game was a revisionist fascist and the game was full of racist propaganda in the guise of "historical fiction" ... and then quietly edit that story and go on to run six weeks of strategy guide coverage for it anyway.
It's a fundamentally broken enterprise, because your livelihood depends on access and ad revenue from the very people you're meant to cover. Game publishers are your real customers, the readers are a product you are delivering to them.
You're compromised from the start, and the money men don't like it when you piss off the customers.
That's why the journos you see actually reporting on abusive employment practices or fraud or whatever are increasingly all working for other media, writing the games coverage for outlets like CNN or Bloomberg or Time ... outfits whose revenue isn't dependent on advertising for the very games and studios they're covering.