With the exception of the first season of The Osbournes and two seasons of Orange Country Choppers (the gigantic battles between father and son Teutul were and are incredibly entertaining), reality TV is not my thing. And even less so now. Maybe 25 years ago there were ideas and concepts for shows that made me want to watch them, but today? No way. Big Brother, Survivor, Temptation Island… All of that is still alive and of course there are many people who still like those shows, but I don’t. In fact, I find my girlfriend’s favorite shows, like Love is Blind and The Bachelor, downright disgusting. When I regularly walk past the TV in our living room and an episode of one of those reality shows is covering the 98-inch screen (with all that entails), I almost immediately feel stupid. That’s how bad those shows seem to me today. .
That said, I obviously shouldn’t have reviewed The Crush House. I’m the wrong person for the job, and in many ways I’d go so far as to call this entire piece highly unethical. Because I hate the idea of simulating Big Brother in video game form. There are few things in our wonderful world of gaming that make me less excited to play than the idea of being a producer, running around a bright pink beach house, trying to get attention-hungry 24-year-olds to make out with each other in front of the cameras. And yet, that’s exactly what I did during my stay at The Crush House.
Welcome to Big Brother: The Video Game, with little additions of The Sims, a pinch of Animal Crossing and a touch of Our Life. Your role as producer is to oversee production and everything that goes with it from the house where the pretty young people live, watched by a multitude of cameras and microphones that project their lives and behavior to the curious outside world. It’s 1999, people are hungry and emotions are running high in The Crush House. Your job is demanding and the developers have packed as many simulation aspects as possible into the role of producer. You have to make sure everything works well in the house when it comes to interpersonal relationships, you also have to make sure the audience is kept happy with the right content, the right relationships, the drama and the right editorial approach and you also have to keep sponsors and advertisers happy. If you don’t do this, you fail and you are thrown back into hardcore game mode at the start.
There’s a level of ambition here that is to be commended. Nerial’s fundamental intention was to create a game much bigger than a simple “Animal Crossing for adults,” and it’s clear that ideas were sprinkled in and, in some cases, worked into production without much thought. Unfortunately, as a result, gameplay often suffers, as players can’t really focus on or get good at a particular area before the next aspect comes at them, demanding your attention, time, and patience more than ever. The Crush House requires patience like few other games in 2024, and at its core, I think it’s a pretty boring walking sim game where you just crawl at a leisurely pace through a house filled with people who fall in love, talk like characters from children’s shows, or get angry too quickly and too often.
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But there are flashes of light. Behind the glitz, the glamour, the people coming together and the dramatic onlookers, the house hides a darker secret that kept me going, that kept me with it until the end. Unfortunately, Nerial doesn’t make anything really memorable out of his “turn”, which is of course unfortunate but also not misleading as, as I said, they have a “kill your darlings” problem throughout the game and ultimately offer an experience that is neither hacked nor topped. I also don’t particularly like the design as the lack of realism in the painting of the people and the house itself unfortunately means I don’t believe what they are saying or what they are feeling. The sound isn’t great either, the people in the house babble a bit like the Minions, with no real voices/proper speech, and there is no music almost constantly.
In addition to all of these issues, The Crush House also has optimization issues, having crashed several times during my few hours with Devolver’s dating story. Ultimately, both the concept and execution are something I neither want to return to nor could I imagine recommending. Simulating this kind of supremely useless reality TV should be practically inexcusable considering how much more rewarding it is to drive a race car, smash trolls over the head with a broad axe, or shoot aliens with high-caliber ammo.
