Imagine playing a free roam version of Pokémon Snap that takes place entirely within a household found in The Sims. Each day peering through your camera, trying to frame up people as they fall in love, biff each other in the mouth or tell anecdotes about jeans. That is The Crush House, and it is a curious beast.
Playing as a less-than-covert camera gal within this Big Brother-esque home, you’ll be tasked with making it through five days of mind numbing reality TV, with the constant threat of cancellation. To avoid this, you will want to pick a dynamic cast of misfits to fight and french kiss each other, all while you parkour across the environment trying to find convenient doorways and windows to capture every intimate moment. Shooting the show is a hoot – it is all done as a live feed, so you will basically stalk the selected goobers within the house, trying to find the juice in their interactions. Often this will be inane chatter, but once you start to clue in to the personality types of your cast you can anticipate things like meltdowns or mushy face smooches.
Buy a second butt? SHIT in STEREO?!?
The main quirk of the gameplay is that each day you’ll be trying to impress specific demographics (audiences) to keep the studio happy. Sometimes this is easy (‘Butt guys’ just wanna see butts) and other times it is a little more nuanced (‘Voyeurs’ want every shot to be a creep shot). If you don’t manage to please the suits upstairs with your daily exploits, your show gets canned and that outcome is just a tad unpleasant. So you best find a way to weave camera magic and film some butts in a voyeuristic way. The craziness ramps up when you start juggling a wider range of audiences, trying to tickle the fancies of everything from plumbing freaks to cringe fans to the elderly. Part of this is catching the cast interacting with each other or things around the house and the rest can be filled in by filming the environment or purchasing new props for the Crush House to fill niches. The ‘Divorced Dads’ demographic likes to see people pumping iron? Well, why not buy some dumbbells – it will go over well with the ‘Gym Junkies’ audience as well.
There is an element of friction that comes up when you start to realise how much easier life would be if you could afford more of the props around the house. In your cold blooded reptilian haste, you are forced to show ads during the program to raise money – with the game clearly telling you that extra cash is paid when a suitable ad is shown to the right audience. The ads themselves are a fever dream of useless products, each brilliantly funny and concerningly weird. The issue I found is that initial efforts to understand a new audience meant I spent a great deal of time framing up shit to figure out what they might like – with any time spent on ads amounting to precious time away from making the network happy. This would often mean my shooting shift would end with a paltry amount of pocket change, so saving up for these critical audience pleasers was a tough break. The audience of the day is fish freaks? Well, the giant empty aquarium in the living room is begging for some piscine buds to call it home – but I can’t afford them. I guess I’ll turn the camera to the sea and see if I can frame up ANY cast members while trying to please the fishing weirdos that are tuning in.
Once you unlock a decent variety of audiences, this starts to feel a bit more relaxed as the Venn diagram of people watching starts to encompass a greater shared portion of the circle. A united front of ‘Butt Guys’ and ‘Foot Fans’ play well alongside the ‘Voyeur’ crowd, and you could nail your audience satisfaction rating before lunch – leaving tons of time for ads. The issue was that it took me nearly four entire seasons to reach this level of comfort, and I couldn’t really figure out if I was doing something wrong. Given how much I struggled fiscally to reach this point with the game, and the overall investments required to hit almost any comfort level with it, I found myself feeling that this should have arrived a lot earlier.
I’m not the one wearing coloured sunglasses at night mate
Of course, this tickled the edge of my subconscious with the suspicion I was playing the game wrong, so I jumped into a new save file to see if I was missing something and realised that a portion of each day’s audience is randomised. This meant that those days when I had a ‘chalk and cheese’ collective watching the show, the stress in trying to please those diametric needs was just due to bad luck. So for an experiment, I bombed out a day of shooting to see what happened. Turns out that you can actually start that day again via a quick reload, and it will reroll the randomised audience selection – so technically you can save-scum your way to a better audience, and a bigger payday. Something of a bummer, maybe the answer was just to amend the game’s difficulty to make my TV Executive overlords a little more lenient. That turned out to be a wash also because lowering the difficulty will simply remove the option of failure entirely…rendering a hefty chunk of the gameplay experience to be moot. Bummer number two.
Where your reality TV dreams end, a hidden reality TV nightmare begins. It should come as no surprise that there is a dark secret to be explored beneath the party house, discovered only when the cameras are turned off and you start to break a few golden rules. In your downtime, you can actually talk with members of your cast and hear their pleas for special treatment within the house – such requests range from something simple like filming them making out with a bunch of people, to mildly more indulgent requests like purchasing an expensive karaoke machine so they can showcase their ‘talent’ before the show ends. Addressing these tasks will unlock further development of the narrative, with each cast member having their own task to be discovered. The frustration here is that you are beholden to the dim intelligence of the cast and their meandering behaviours of the day, which does make perfect sense for a house of fame-hungry airheads. Film someone making two enemies? Sure, that is easy enough when the casting matches up some firecracker personalities ready to clash but becomes a serious splinter in your arse when you are two-thirds of the way through the season and that individual has already pissed off everyone else in the house. A third bummer.
Nailing what an audience likes is always a thrill
The lion’s share of this exasperation comes from the inability to really influence your precious captives. Sure, it is supposed to be “reality”, where you are only observing – but when you have a mighty need to film a specific subject matter for either an audience or for one of your cast tasks, it would be nice to have some level of control. Hilariously, when you purchase a new prop for your set, you are almost guaranteed to have the cast come out the following morning and immediately check it out – where they will then fall victim to its wiles. A statue of two figures hugging? Bam, they will congregate around it and start hugging – just the ticket when you have a task to record someone enjoying such a thing. But once again, this is only when you first buy the thing. So you almost need to strategise what you buy and when in the hopes of checking off your boxes, because once the NEW TOY vibe has passed, it will simply become another random thing that they might pay attention to at a later date. A simple fix for this would be to maybe encourage your goldfishbrained mooks to approach something if you have it squarely framed in your camera, if only as an accurate depiction of these people hungrily seeking their fifteen minutes of fame. It would surely beat the alternative of sitting there, seething and angrily saying kiss her you fool at the digital dickheads on screen – all so you can edge ever closer to what lies beneath the Crush House.
With beautiful stylisation that means the game doesn’t need to be absurdly detailed, you’d imagine that it would run brilliantly on everything from a Nintendo Switch to a Samsung Smart Fridge, but good lord does it hitch up and trip over itself at times. These come as short freezes, dropped frames, and a super awkward hitching that happens when you whirl your camera a bit too fast. Jumping into the graphical options of the game to see what can be sacrificed to fix it will leave you wanting because The Crush House finds itself to be incredibly slim in that department. It could be pre-release oddities that are being polished up for the day one patch but it was hard to ignore. There was also the odd mysterious behaviour where a cast member would interact with a prop that you did not own yet, leading to a hilarious performance of Mime as the doofus would sit on an imaginary chair, reading an imaginary book. This in particular would work great as an intended feature, if only for the comedy.
Well no shit Gunther, the lady is trying to take a whizz
Final Thoughts
It is agonising to try and share some final thoughts for The Crush House. The concept and execution at its core is top notch, offering a brilliant twist on some existing gimmicks that just aren’t all that common. The disappointment comes from the end of the honeymoon period, where you find yourself hungry for just a little more depth to really reach your TV production potential. I have rarely found a game that offered such a concise gameplay loop, that was wildly fun to engage with and excited you to master it – only to then hit your head on the ceiling of your ambitions in rapid fashion. While my gripes might paint a picture of this game not being a recommendation, I have to insist that the fun parts of The Crush House are absurdly fun. This isn’t a case of the game being broken or unloved, quite the opposite – it is an exceptional level of potential not quite reaching its zenith. Film some butts, see for yourself.
Reviewed on PC // Review code supplied by publisher
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- Nerial
- Devolver Digital
- PC
- August 10, 2024

Known throughout the interwebs simply as M0D3Rn, Ash is bad at video games. An old guard gamer who suffers from being generally opinionated, it comes as no surprise that he is both brutally loyal and yet, fiercely whimsical about all things electronic. On occasion will make a youtube video that actually gets views. Follow him on YouTube @Bad at Video Games
