The Crush House review: Reality Bites

It’s probably my most boomer complaint, but I’m of the firm and unchanging opinion that the world would be better off without the vast majority of reality TV.

At best reality TV involves throwing a bunch of clearly vulnerable people into compromising situations and then letting audiences at home piss themselves laughing at various mental breakdowns that have been purposefully engineered by producers. At worst it attempts to humanise Nigel Farage.

As such, I approached Nerial and Devolver Digital’s new reality TV show sim The Crush House with guarded interest. Would stepping into the role of the producer on a 1999 reality sensation offer a fresh perspective on a world I’ve always found to be seedy and grim? Not really, it turns out.

The Crush House revolves around a simple premise: as producer, you pick up the camcorder and put together your own season of reality TV without getting cancelled. You choose the cast, decorate the house with props, and set about filming various conflicts and romances.

A “season” lasts Monday to Friday, and to avoid getting cancelled you have to satisfy the various audiences that tune in on each specific day. For example, on Monday you may have to focus on filming the cast from a distance to satisfy the voyeuristic audience, while Wednesday will see you doing lots of shots of people’s butts.

As the game progresses you’ll have to satisfy larger and more varied groups of audiences at once. Some audiences may want you to show them specific props like paintings or plumbing. Others want to see fancy filming techniques or arguments break out between the cast.

There’s also a larger story about something unsettling going on at The Crush House behind the scenes, which should be a fun mystery for us to uncover. Unfortunately it’s all completely undone by the fact the meat of the gameplay - wandering around a small house with a camera watching idiots have idiotic conversations - is frustratingly boring. It’s like being asked to punch myself in the face before I can read the next chapter of my book.

For the first couple of seasons shadowing the cast and seeing how the various characters interact is fairly interesting. But it soon becomes clear these are vapid, awful people who spend the majority of their time fighting or screwing with seemingly no rhyme or reason. Things just seem to happen in the house, and the best you can do is spin around with your camera until you catch something the audience cares about.

You’d hope the audience satisfaction system would add a layer of strategy, too. But when you’re spending 30 seconds pointing your camera at a bathroom sink so fans of plumbing don’t tune out, you start to wonder if there are other things you could be doing with your time.

Even some of the more demanding audiences who you would assume would introduce some more interesting elements ultimately fall flat. Take the voyeuristic audience. These people are supposed to reward you for remaining unseen and getting footage without the cast knowing you’re there. What could have added a stealth twist simply doesn’t work. On more than one occasion I found myself satisfying the voyeurs by accidentally filming the cast through solid walls, or by being stood directly in front of them in full view.

There are some really nice ideas in The Crush House, but ultimately it’s unable to tie any of it together in a meaningful way. Fans of dating sims will probably get a real kick out of the first few seasons of the game, but before long the crushing repetition sets in and you find yourself sinking to new lows to satisfy an ever-dwindling audience of perverts. I guess it’s a lot more like reality TV than I gave it credit for, actually.

Pros: A fun central mystery

Cons: Awful characters, repetitive gameplay

For fans of: Dating sims, reality TV

5/10: Average

The Crush House is available now on PC via Steam. Review code was provided by the publisher. Find a complete guide to GAMINGbible's review scores here.