Reality shows fascinate me, which is why The Crush House fascinates me. I don’t watch them, though I did binge The Circle and Too Hot To Handle with my friends during the pandemic – we were all isolated, lonely, and bored. While my job now is mainly written journalism, I graduated from university with a concentration in Broadcast Journalism and Film Studies, which meant that I spent several semesters learning not just how to film and edit documentary and news pieces, but how to do so ethically.
It’s very easy to cut soundbites together and create a narrative that isn’t accurate or true, and it’s impossible to get around the inherent fact that the way you put video together creates a narrative. There’s no true objectivity in journalism – there’s always interpretation involved. But reality shows are particularly guilty of twisting the facts, and everybody knows it. Reality shows aren’t real at all – they’re reels of the most dramatic, entertaining moments caught on camera, cut together to portray people at their best or worst.
That’s good television, but it’s not honest. But people still love reality television despite that knowledge, to the point where they’re almost watching a meta version of the shows, trying to figure out who these peoplereallyare beyond the way the show portrays them. That’s made all the more enthralling because the stars usually have big social media presences to pick apart.
The Crush House, my new most anticipated game, capitalises on this meta-understanding. The Devolver-published self-billed ‘thirst-person shooter’ puts you in the shoes of the one-person crew behind the eponymous 1999 reality TV show. Your job is to produce and film the show on your own, watching how the four characters you’ve cast in the show interact with each other, and decide what to focus on. But it seems there’s a deeper mystery under the whole thing that you’ll have to work to solve.
Each character you can cast has their own personality traits, and you can play them off of each other to create drama. They’ll talk, fight, flirt, even make out with each other. You have to catch it all, following pairs to different spots in the pink mansion to catch good footage. The show is being live-streamed, and your audience will want different things and tell you so through emojis in a comment feed on the screen. Not satisfying the day’s audiences will give you a game over.
There’s even an activist audience that wants you to show how the show is exploitative and fake.
There’s plenty to do at night, too. During the day, you’ll run ads when the camera isn’t filming, most of which were created by other Devolver devs for their upcoming games. The money you make from those can be put towards buying props, which will add activities and points of interest to the house. You can also check the ratings, extrapolate what the next day’s audiences will be, and field requests from the cast members that you’ve been explicitly instructed not to interact with.
Even without that mystery, this game would have hooked me immediately. The game isn’t just a reality show simulator, it’s one that forces you to make the decisions that reality show producers make constantly, and evaluate the ethics and efficacy of those choices. Wrapping that up with a story that pushes you to dig deeper is just a cherry on top of the sundae. I hadn’t heard about this game before today, but I haven’t been this excited to play a game since I first triedLike a Dragon: Infinite Wealth.
