The Crush House

Minus the opening season of The Osbournes and two seasons of Orange Country Choppers (the giant fights between father and son Teutul were and remain ridiculously entertaining, haha), reality TV is really not my thing. Especially not anymore. Maybe 25 years ago there were programme ideas and concepts that made me watch but today? Not a chance. Big Brother, Survivor, The Farm... All that stuff is still alive and well and of course there are plenty of people who still like the shows, but I don't. In fact, I find my girlfriend's favourite shows like Love is Blind and The Bachelor downright disgusting, today. When I periodically walk past our living room TV and some random episode of those reality shows covers the 98" screen (with all that entails), I almost immediately feel dumber. That's how damned bad I think those programmes are, today.

That said, of course I should not have reviewed The Crush House. I'm the wrong person for this job, and in many ways it would go as far as to call this whole text one big misconduct. Because I hate the idea of simulating Big Brother, in game form. Very few things in our wonderful gaming world make me want to play less than the idea of being a producer, clattering around a bright pink beach house, trying to get attention-hungry 24-year-olds to make out with each other in front of the TV cameras. And yet, despite all this - that's exactly what I did during my time with The Crush House.

Welcome to Big Brother: The Game, cross-pollinated with little bits of The Sims, a dash of Animal Crossing and a touch of Our Life. Your role as a producer is to oversee the production and all that it entails, from inside the house where the young, good-looking people live - watched over by a multitude of cameras and microphones projecting their lives and behaviour to the curious world outside. It's 1999, people are hungry and emotions are bubbling inside The Crush house. Your job is demanding and the developers have crammed as many sim aspects as possible into the role of producer. You have to make sure everything runs smoothly inside the house in terms of human relationships, you also have to keep the audience happy with the right content, the right relationships, drama and the right focus on editorial and you have to keep sponsors and advertisers happy - too. If you don't, you fail and are thrown into the Hardcore game mode back at the start.

There's a level of ambition here that has to be commended. Nerial's basic outlook has been to create a much bigger game than just an "Animal Crossing for adults" and it's clear that ideas have been sprinkled and in some cases, pounded into the production without much thought. Unfortunately. As a result, playability often suffers as players can't really focus on a specific area or get good at what they're doing before the next aspect is thrown at them and demands your attention, time and patience - more than ever. The Crush House requires patience like few other 2024 games, and at its core I think it's a pretty damn boring walking sim game where you're just crawling around a house at a leisurely pace where people who talk like children's programme characters either fall in love or get annoyed, far too easily and far too often.

But there are glimmers of light. Behind the glitz, the glamour, the people making out and the drama-demanding TV viewers, the house is harbouring a darker kind of secret that drove me forward, that made me stick with it until the end. Unfortunately, Nerial doesn't really make anything memorable of their "twist" which is of course unfortunate, but also not tricky as they have, as I said, a problem with "kill your darlings" throughout the game and ultimately offer an experience that comes across as neither minced nor milled. I'm not particularly fond of the design either as the lack of any sort of realism in how the people and the house itself are painted makes me not believe what they say or their feelings, unfortunately. The sound is also not very good as the people in the house babble a bit like the Minions without real voices/real language and there is no music, almost constantly.

On top of all these issues, The Crush House also has problems with optimisation as it has bugged out and crashed several times during my few hours with Devolver's dating story. Ultimately, both the concept and the execution are something I neither want to return to nor could ever imagine recommending. Simulating this kind of super uselessly pointless reality TV should be virtually unmissable given how much more rewarding it is to drive a race car, hit trolls in the head with a broad axe or shoot aliens with large calibre ammunition.