The Crush House Review

The Crush House is a game that attempts to make a statement about the dark nature of reality TV by creating a simulation of its most boring aspects. You play as Jae, the producer of The Crush House series who’s really more of a glorified gopher/camera person. As a new season opens, you pick four contestants from a pool of twelve to star in the upcoming season. I use “contestants” lightly here, because it’s not entirely clear what these people are supposed to get out of their participation beyond being the center of the attention of a mass of nameless strangers watching them from the other side of a screen.

The reality of reality television is that it is a highly manipulated and staged version of reality. The Crush House gives you very little control over the situation, though, and you play the game more as a voyeur than a producer. Each episode of The Crush House begins when the contestants enter the Malibu Barbie-esque beach house from their subterranean bedrooms in the morning and ends once the sun sets. Your basic goal is to follow them around hoping to film interesting interactions between the various characters, but there’s a catch.

The show is filmed live and each day the viewers are represented by a different collection of demographics. You must score enough points with a required number of these demographics in order for them to be pleased with the show. Fail to do so and your show will be instantly canceled, forcing you to start over again. Some demographics are easy to understand and please – plant lovers just want plants in a shot, there doesn’t have to be much of anything else going on, and plumbers love fixtures and water features. The desires of others can be difficult to interpret and satisfy – what film students consider to be artsy camera work and the balance between romance and conflict on screen that suburban moms desire aren’t at all apparent. The game does try to provide you with some help through the use of a live social feed on the side of the screen, but it doesn’t really help with some of the demographics. Seeing a film student comment that a shot was “Lynchian” lets you know that you probably did something that pleased them but leaves you unsure of quite what that was.

You really are at the mercy of the combination of demographics the game throws at you on any given day. Get butt guys, landscape lovers, and the motion sick together, and you can simply plop yourself down in the garden and film the butts of two contestants conversing. Get drama queens and the wholesome on the same day and you’ll have problems.

You can’t do anything to force the contestants to interact – you’ll need to keep an eye on where each one is roaming and rush to the spot if two of them randomly encounter each other and begin conversing. You can add objects to the house in an attempt to provide props that trigger contestant interactions or to please certain demographics, but you’ll need to purchase these items and The Crush House is a show that generates its budget in real-time.

To earn money you run ads during the show. Running these ads is easy – every time you turn off your camera the commercials start rolling. The catch, of course, is that while the ads earn cash they come at the cost of not providing anything to your viewer demographics. While you can earn a trickle of money by simply turning your camera off while running from one pair of contestants to another, earning a useful income requires extensive time devoted to commercials. While not exactly a valid strategy for a real program, the best way to earn money is to satisfy enough easy to please demographics to stay on the air and then run commercials for the rest of the day. Even if you’re lucky enough to be able to do that for a day, the props are expensive and you’ll only be able to add them to the beach house piecemeal. There’s also some risk involved – do you invest in expensive aquarium fish in the hopes that plumbers will tune in tomorrow?

There is a subplot running beneath the show’s primary purpose of making money from vapid entertainment. You’re forbidden from interacting with the cast, but sometimes they will emerge at night to converse with you and ask for certain objects to be placed in the house or for you to film or not film them doing certain things during the day. It’s not at all apparent that this aspect of the game even exists. You end the day by going to bed and you’ll usually just wander down to your quarters after the cast retries to load up the next day. You’ll have no idea this aspect of the game even exists unless you decide to spend some time in the house at night, and the nighttime interactions are the only way to trigger the advancement of the game’s underlying story. I’m not going to spoil any of it here, but it’s the kind of twist that has its impact severely softened by the fact that it’s been done so many times before and you’ll easily see it coming.

There is a subplot running beneath the show’s primary purpose of making money from vapid

There are some interesting ideas at play here and the reality TV show simulation genre is far from crowded, but the problem is that there is so little to the actual core gameplay. The voyeuristic nature of reality TV makes this a game in which you spend a lot of time simply listening to the characters speak to each other and finding that what they have to say isn’t all that interesting. I can’t help but feel that if this was more of a real simulation of reality TV that gave you a lot more control in staging and forcing dramatic moments, then The Crush House would be more fun to play. As it is, it’s a bit of curiosity that will keep your interest about as long as it does your fictional viewers’.