Armed with a camera and complete control of what viewers see inside a Big Brother-esq reality TV show home, you play the head producer of The Crush House. What you shoot must be good, and how you play to thirsty fans or romantics watching live is also up to you. But while the toolbox at first seems exciting, The Crush House is soon bogged down by a point system that ruins the fun.
At the start of each season of The Crush House, you’ll pick from a cast and choose the four housemates who’ll enter the house through an exciting entrance via a tunnel in the swimming pool. One by one, they drop a one-liner to show some of their personality, and you can watch those who have already entered on the sideline giving Sims-like reactions to their feelings for each new housemate.
After you have the four housemates, you have seven days to keep the show on air. There will be different types of viewers each day, and you must attempt to please them. Cinephiles want crazy camera angles; Peeping Toms want everything filled from far away; foodies want… food, and ass and feet people, well, they want you to film ass and feet. It sounds like a good idea on paper. Until the number of people you’re trying to appease in a days shoot, and until you first fail a day, it is entertaining to run around zooming in on housemates’ butts to see the thirsty Twitch-like live chat on the side of the screen explaining how happy they are. But as different types of people ask for other things, I found myself paying less and less attention to what’s happening with the four housemates and more on filming trees at weird angles or lighthouses I’d put in the backyard to rack up points so I could finish the day with a passing score.
Between days, as the housemates enter their sleeping quarters, you can venture out to buy objects to place into the house. The money you use for this comes from ads you can run when you tab out from recording with the camera. You’re encouraged to make the most of the downtime between drama in the house to run as many ads as possible. Of course, run too many, and you’ll miss the action and not pass the day.
However, the core story that’s trying to be told in The Crush House also happens between days as you’ll hear whispers of communication with secret characters and agree to do odd jobs for housemates in secret. The growing feeling that ‘reality show overlords bad?’ seems to be the game’s core message. Kinda. Because as much as that’s the drip-fed backing to all of what’s going on, there’s also a lot of love here for the genre. And when the game offers two different endings depending on a choice you’re making, it seems to be for the people who are anti-reality TV or those that are more, “Hey, I like good reality TV, but separate overlords have sort of ruined it.”
There’s a choice at the very start of The Crush House before the game begins that’ll see you either having more fun or not. One is the recommended difficulty, where you can fail a day if you don’t appease all the fans online, and the other is a more casual setting where you can’t fail. If you choose the recommended setting, you’ll be disappointed, like I am, as the game falls too involved in its own systems and takes away any fun it initially sets up. By the time I’d gotten through to my fifth season of the show and was working towards unlocking the game ending, I was going through the motions; I didn’t care about these characters, I didn’t care about the fans, I just wanted it to end. But maybe that’s the point.
(Review code provided to Explosion Network.
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