I’m not a huge fan of reality TV (with the exception of Sister Wives because it’s about religion), so I wasn’t sure recent game The Crush House would be my thing. But the game is less about cringing at other people’s drama and more about what it’s like to use the core mechanic of filming that drama to explore what stands between a reality show's subjects and their audience.
The Crush House, which came out last week, casts you as Jae, a producer on a reality show. You select a cast of four characters and then film them living in a glitzy mansion together, keeping different audiences satisfied enough to keep the show from getting cancelled. If you make it through a week-long season, the cast goes home, and then you start over with a new cast of your choosing.
There’s an underlying plot about things not being quite what they seem in the titular Crush House. To move that story forward, you need to do on-the-side tasks for cast members, which can’t necessarily be completed in one season of the show. This adds some structure to your repeated runs, but I could also find it a little annoying when I had to bring back cast members across seasons just to knock out their goals. But this also brings in The Crush House’s first layer of strategy: if I need to film softboi Milo making friends and enemies, I have to pick other cast members likely to form those relationships with him, like the sunny Charlie or the pretentious Gunther.
This cast makeup also matters for the audiences you have to satisfy to keep the show from getting cancelled. Every morning, you get a growing list of viewers with particular desires. Some are straightforward: Butt Guys want to see butts, and Plumbers want to see the house’s water fixtures. Voyeurs want to see the cast filmed from faraway, creepy angles, and Film Students want to see fancy shots. But other audiences can be harder to please, with unclear desires–what the hell do The Glitched or Nursing Home residents like?--or reliant on the cast doing things you may or may not be able to engineer. Divorced Dads want to see men bonding, so you’ll need male cast members likely to bond; Drama Queens want to see people fighting, so you’ll need cast members likely to clash.
Since you don’t know what audiences you’ll get when you’re picking a cast at the start of the season, this can be tough– once, I found myself needing to satisfy Girls for Girls fans when I had a cast full of boys. Luckily, fully satisfied audiences’ enthusiasm will leak over to other audiences, helping you make up the gaps. And you can also buy props, using money you get from ads Jae runs when she’s not filming, to make cast members more likely to engage in certain behaviors or to help satisfy audiences–Divorced Dads will be happy to look at the grill if you don’t have male cast members who are friends. But props can be expensive, and time spent running ads means time not filming, making each day a hectic balancing act.
Eventually, you’ll see all the audiences and know what they want, but the game felt the most fun to me when I’d get a brand-new audience and rush frantically around the house aiming my camera at everything to try to figure out what they wanted to see. There’s a thrill to staring down five audiences late into a season, with some wanting to see the garden, others wanting to see two characters fighting by the pool, and others wanting to see my cast full of enemies impossibly be friends. All this leaves me running back and forth, squeezing ads into the transition, hoping I make it to the end of the day.
At the same time, all this really boils down to just swinging your camera around until various icons appear on the screen, with the actual cast and their lives becoming secondary. I’m not sure if The Crush House wants you to be engaged in casts’ lives and desires, the way an actual reality TV audience is meant to, or if the game’s mechanics are meant to make you see them as just means to an end, number-go-up generators that keep the show going, the way the game’s deeper plot suggests. Most likely, it’s meant to be both–not so much to make a statement about reality TV as to situate you in that tension at its heart. I often felt like I had largely missed the actual relationships between people in a season, engaged in swinging between shots of the offshore lighthouse and a branded juice machine to give my audiences what they wanted while actual human drama went on out of frame.
I found the game more mechanically fun than I found it narratively engaging, but that’s not a bad thing. Each day felt stressful and exciting as I grew familiar with the best vantage points in the house or the perfect camera angle, squeezing in an ad or two to work toward a prop as I noticed drama stewing or romance about to ensue. Failure means starting a day over, and you can also set the difficulty so that the show is never cancelled, meaning the stakes are never high enough to make the game too frustrating if you’re unlucky with your audiences or cast. The core thing you do in the game is enjoyable, even if it’s not all that deep.
I’m enjoying the way The Crush House scratches a certain roguelike itch I have; I've seen other reviews liken it to a twist on a first-person shooter, which is another fun way to look at it. Each day is a jumble of conflicting demands, a combination of repetition and randomness that I steadily master, selectively choosing from realities on offer while filming a lot of faucets and video game character butts along the way.
