The Crush House review: What if reality TV was bad and evil?

Putting a group of young people in a box, pointing cameras at them, and ruining their lives for a potential slice of fame and fortune is a timeless tradition in entertainment. But what if reality TV was even worse? What if technology allowed producers to literally squeeze the life and soul out of their talent and crew in order to keep their IP gravy train on the tracks forever? Well, the answer is clearly “they totally would if they could,” but The Crush House is here to raise the question anyway. And, frankly, it doesn’t do so in a way that’s fun or interesting.

Are media executives bad people?

The Crush House is, from a raw gameplay sense, a sort of reality TV simulator. As the producer and sole camera operator, your goal is to make “The Network” happy with a successful season of the show. You choose four cast members from a small list, and are given a list of audience demographics every day. To keep the season going you have to make a given number of demos happy, and if successful at the end of the week everyone gets to ride the Success Slide. Every night you can spend your ad earnings to decorate the house, or a member of the cast might break the rules and ask you for help. There’s also a chance you’ll hear from a mysterious group that lives underneath the set.

There are neat ideas at play here, but at the end of the day The Crush House is not fun to engage with, nor is it not fun in a way that finds interesting uses of friction to make some kind of point. It’s just a bummer to interact with all the way through. That’s largely because the sim elements clash with the pass/fail state you have to meet each day, in ways that feel completely arbitrary and out of your control. The moment to moment gameplay is completely lifeless, and the writing is neither sharp nor funny enough to make staring at The Crush House for the time it takes an in-game day to pass feel worthwhile.

Audience capture

At first, it feels like The Crush House might be cooking. The cast members erupt from a tube underneath the kitschy properties’ pool, and their goofball personalities promise to fuel the experience with drama. A cascade of audience chat messages falls on one side of the screen, looking like a vapid Facebook live chat straight out of real life. The cast will get in random slap fights, bizarre arguments, and start making out with no warning. All the while, they speak like Animal Crossing characters complete with the silly sound effects tied to emotions. It’s certainly absurd.

The problem is how you make the audience happy. Different demos want different things, such as people interested in drama, arguments, romance, cinematography, butts, feet, plumbing infrastructure, so on and so forth. The demos themselves can be funny, but in practice you’re scored based on what you point the camera at. You follow the cast around, point the camera, and hope whatever’s in the shot is picked up on and starts generating points. If not, you adjust your shot until you start getting points, and hopefully more than one element gains points to give you a bonus. And if you get enough points in one category to get a passing grade, further points in that category spill into the others.

The demos you are assigned each day are random. If they clash in a way that makes points difficult to get, either because you don’t have the right decorations in place or the cast itself doesn’t match up well, you’re screwed. All you can do is try desperately to build points and get through by the skin of your teeth. If you fail you have to go through a whole sequence and multiple loading screens, then retry the day with reshuffled demos. Sometimes the demos line up perfectly and all you have to do is turn the camera on and watch the points roll in.

We get it, there's a spooky thing happening

To advance the plot you have to be approached by a cast member and given a task. These are also entirely up to the game running itself. An example might be to watch a character interact with others in specific ways. All you can really do is follow them around, hope they do those things, and maybe grind enough money to put a waffle maker in the kitchen or whatever to push it along. All the while hoping the demos don’t screw you over so you don’t have to redo the whole day.

To complete the story you’ll likely need to run multiple seasons, because it can take multiple days to solve a task, and multiple seasons to raise enough money (and unlock the options) for the right decorations. One character, for example, wants a whole karaoke setup that costs thousands of dollars. Money is earned through turning the camera off and running ads, which net you around 50 bucks or so every few seconds. Of course you can’t film, so there’s a push and pull element of finding the right times to run ads. Making income a glacial process of course.

If you do get fed up with it, The Crush House does let you mode switch to make failing impossible (or making retrying impossible, if you revel in self-loathing). If you do that you can focus on the banal character interactions, or simply leave the camera off for the whole day and let the ads run. About halfway through the third season I opted for this, simply turning my brain off until I could move on to the next season to get more character tasks lined up. Fun stuff, folks!

Soylent Green

The reward for slogging through the The Crush House production is getting a look at the sinister truth behind the show’s long-running success. It’s presented in a way that’s still trying to be goofy and sardonic, which ends up making it awkwardly communicated and not compelling. It’s also kind of a boilerplate premise in the first place, since we’re talking about reality TV here. I can’t believe this form of programming is problematic! It would almost be more subversive if the show turned out to be a puppy rescuing operation instead of a plot to wring the souls out of teenagers for profit. Imagine that.

The Crush House feels like a victim of its own confidence. It’s so self-sure of its premise and big-brained twist that it fails to dig a little deeper under the surface to actually justify any of it. The gameplay itself is incredibly shallow and dull when it isn’t being a frustrating exercise in dice-rolling. The characters are basically all the same person and interact with each other the same ways, repeating the same small set of possible events over and over. Your involvement in the whole equation is to sit there and watch, and hope the emojis and numbers on the screen are doing the good thing instead of irritating you. The payoff is just as shallow as the gameplay, making the whole subversive twist as commentary gimmick a bust.

The Crush House is available on August 9, 2024 for PC. A code was provided by the publisher for review.

Lucas White

Contributing Editor

Lucas plays a lot of videogames. Sometimes he enjoys one. His favorites include Dragon Quest, SaGa, and Mystery Dungeon. He's far too rattled with ADHD to care about world-building lore but will get lost for days in essays about themes and characters. Holds a journalism degree, which makes conversations about Oxford Commas awkward to say the least. Not a trophy hunter but platinumed Sifu out of sheer spite and got 100 percent in Rondo of Blood because it rules. You can find him on Twitter @HokutoNoLucas being curmudgeonly about Square Enix discourse and occasionally saying positive things about Konami.