Devolver Digital’s The Crush House has arrived and brings with it an incredibly chaotic, disturbing view of reality TV. It’s like a sci-fi take on UnREAL with no happy endings… and unfortunately, despite an incredible marketing campaign and perfect ‘90s aesthetics, it’s not worth the price or the time invested to see where the story leads.

The Crush House follows 12 cast members across multiple seasons. You play Jae, a producer tasked with casting four individuals for a new season of the popular dating show. Each season consists of five days, during which you have to satisfy a certain number of audiences by filing what they want to see. This pleases the Network, and the show goes on. If ever you fail, the show is canceled and you and the cast go down the Failure Elevator as opposed to the Success Slide… though under the surface, there’s something much more sinister at work.

Jae has two rules: NEVER talk to the talent and the audience is ALWAYS right. But to uncover the mystery behind The Crush House, you must break the rules and explore parts of the house the camera is never meant to see.

SPOILER ALERT: This review contains plot and endgame spoilers for The Crush House. Proceed with caution.

The Crush House gameplay

Gameplay in The Crush House isn’t particularly complex, but it is deeply frustrating. You start each season by casting four individuals from a pool of 12 based on their personality traits and brief bios. The game’s marketing indicates that you can manipulate situations and relationships to create drama for the audience, but that isn’t the case. The cast essentially repeats daily interactions, with their relationships flipping from flirtation to violence and back again in mere seconds. Dialogue repeats until you acquire enough props to prompt new conversations.

Unfortunately, props are expensive and the only way to earn money is to run ads. To run ads, you have to stop filming, and filming is the only way to satisfy your audience(s). Sometimes, audiences have opposing desires, forcing you to constantly make choices about what to film and when. If an audience is dissatisfied for long enough, they’ll change the channel and another audience will take its place. And even though the loading screen reminds you that audiences like seeing their favorite cast members, filming the cast isn’t the most effective way to satisfy most audiences. You’re better off getting as many different kinds of props into the frame as you can and hoping for enough synthesis to prompt the “On Fire!” booster, which briefly increases audience satisfaction rates.

The best technique I found to succeed each day and not get canceled over and over (which I did at first) is to run around the house with the camera on, filming props to fulfill audience desires. Ideally, all audiences will be satisfied by sunset, allowing you to turn off the camera and run ads until the end of the night. (If you’re worried about missing juicy story tidbits with this method, don’t be.) After the cast goes to bed, you can buy props. This requires some strategy, as well. As I mentioned above, props are expensive. Certain cast quests ask you to buy certain things, and audiences all want different decor to admire in the house. I tried to buy as many different types of things as I could, then bought whatever I wanted until I reached the endgame.

Cast quests are the last big component of The Crush House. At night, after the cast has allegedly gone to bed and you’re allowed to roam around the house and buy props, you’ll often encounter cast members who want to talk to you. Although the production assistant clearly states that Jae isn’t supposed to talk to the cast, the only way to move the story forward is to break that rule. Cast members will ask you to film certain things or buy certain props, then thank you for helping them. And helping the cast introduces you to what’s going on under the house, AKA the big mystery behind the Network and its violence.

What’s the mystery in The Crush House?

Essentially, the Network initially cast 13 individuals for The Crush House and hired Jae to produce. Then it kidnapped all of the Originals and used pieces of their flesh to repeatedly produce copies of them for new seasons of the show. You’ll notice that each time you start a new season, the production assistant will tell you that things didn’t work out with last season’s producer—even though you’re the same player and you’re seemingly controlling the same Jae. As it turns out, not so much.

Original Alex and Original Bea, two of the cast members, are living under the house and attempting to stop the cycle via opposing means. Bea wants to show “The Crusher”—the giant juice tank used to produce new copies—to the audiences and expose the Network. Alex wants to rescue at least one season’s cast by setting them free in the boat the Originals took to the house for the show’s first season.

No matter which option you pick, multiple people die. It’s pretty gruesome and—paired with how the current cast recycles the same dialogue and actions—it’s almost a great critique of the churn and burn cycle of reality TV. However, the story is so slow and the details so murky that navigating the repetitive, uninspired gameplay in between makes it feel watered down and not worth it. It’s also hard to root for Original Alex or Original Bea. There’s a 13th cast member you never meet, though Alex and Bea talk about him and swear what they’re doing is in his memory. Rather than adding emotional intensity or empathy to the story, this actually makes them both seem worse for what they’re doing.

Going against the Network and destroying The Crush House’s reputation as a mostly harmless reality series makes sense. Helping the cast escape the violent clutches of the Network and the Crusher makes sense. As a real human being who often feels weird about the exploitative nature of certain reality series, I should want to get to the endgame and help these characters pull off these feats. But by the time the endgame arrived, I was so burnt out on this game that the horror of both endings resulting in death didn’t even really register.

Despite my excitement for it, I wouldn’t recommend The Crush House. If you’ve played the game and loved it, I’d love to hear why in the comments below.

The Crush House is available for PC via Steam.

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