The Crush House has drama, but struggles to keep its focus

It is a Thursday morning, and I’m prepping myself for the TV production equivalent of a triathlon. I will be running, leaping, squatting, and all other manner of athletically maneuvering around the small reality TV set of The Crush House, following four would-be stars as they fight and fall in love. Maybe a bit of both.

My goal, as intrepid producer Jae, is to film it all. But really, I’m not looking for the specific moments you might normally seek out; I’m looking for the right framing, the proper angles, and the perfect shots to appease my audience. It’s this aspect that makes The Crush House fascinating, and also a bit frustrating.

The latest project from the Reigns and Card Shark team Nerial and published by Devolver Digital, The Crush House aims to put you in the camera op’s shoes during the most ripped-from-the-TV-set ’90s reality show ever: the titular Crush House. Each week, you pick four cast members to populate the set and, across four days, get into all kinds of drama.

You hold the camera, and can choose to film or not film. The only benefit to not filming is advertising dollars—we’ll get back to that later. Each day, you need to appease a certain number of audiences watching the show, or the powers-that-be will cancel your production, with some implied consequences beyond losing your job.

The audience is king

The loop is fairly easy to understand, and the controls are simple enough to put the focus (ha) on the camerawork. I’m not crazy about holding space-bar to “charge” up a jump, but that’s really just personal preference. But to understand The Crush House, in both its appeals and its setbacks, we need to look at the audience.

Let’s say you start a day with four audiences: Plumbers (a regular favorite of mine), Wine-Loving Moms, Girls For Girls, and Voyeurs. Each one of those audiences wants something different, and while sometimes it can come from cast interactions, more often than not, some of your audiences will want to see certain things in the frame. Plumbers want to see how the pipes of The Crush House snake through the set, while those with a green thumb might want to view the garden, or lighthouse fans… really just want to see that lighthouse off in the distance. They’re like, really into lighthouses.

At first, I enjoyed this as a challenge to try and think about the way I framed each “scene.” I quickly recognized the routine that cast members go through, how they pair up and split back off for predetermined moments of interaction. Rather than just go for a straight-on shot, whether they were kissing or swinging fists, I could try to get some flora in the shot for those flower fanatics, or get a high angle for the movie geeks.

There’s a limited amount of time in the day though, and it takes a while to fully appease an audience. Some of them felt nigh-impossible to coordinate with others, because of how specific their wants were. Or if you could get three or more in a single frame, creating a bit of a “heat time” action effect, I’d still walk away with quite a bit of appeasing to do.

And that’s where some of the issues with the camera come into play. Frequently I’d be squirming around and wiggling the lens, trying to “latch” onto the different icons on the screen indicating I was filming something the audience wanted. Wiggling back and forth, zooming in and out to try and get the right focus to get two interests in the same shot, was a frequent occurrence. It’s hard to describe it as anything else but fidgety. It doesn’t help that the auto-focus doesn’t always grab a face.

Not getting enough audience appraisal isn’t just a demerit, but an instant-fail state, requiring the player to start the whole day over. And while days can be a bit lengthy, it feels like sprinting a 200m race and being told to do it over again. I was playing on the middle difficulty level, and there is an option for those who want to not fret about audience desires, but I felt like swapping to this would be losing the aspect of The Crush House I find interesting, as much as it frustrates me.

Spilling tea

Because of this dead-sprint I was constantly in, it was hard to ever really zero-in on the actual stories unfolding in front of me. When I did get the chance, I found them to be fine. Cast members will like and dislike each other, usually based off their personality traits, so picking some favorable (or unfavorable) vibes made it easy to set up some romance and some drama in equal measure.

As the cast members bounce off each other in dramatic fashion for a week, some of the turning cogs in the machine became apparent. Their interpersonal beefs and crushes were okay, but lacked any deep development or recurring stories; it’s natural because of the length of the run and how, I imagine, they run through their possible love-or-hate dialogues. In a few cases, I had bizarre moments of cast members interrupting conversations from across the set and other weird glitches, and also, they all have a tendency of turning their heads all the way around like owls. It’s a bit unsettling.

The intended disturbances are also there, in the form of The Crush House‘s meta-narrative plot. Obviously, something’s up with this whole set-up. Even just the weird looping week should probably tip you, Jae, off. As you get further into the game, you’ll start to uncover more about what The Crush House really is. I haven’t seen it all the way through yet, so I can’t really tell you, but I can say that I found this plot to be interesting.

The best part of it is how it starts to issue you quests, with different cast members asking for favors. One might want you to buy some props to set up the perfect scene, while another just wants two solid minutes of continuous footage around one specific object. Satisfying them starts to drip in some extra story and world-building, and I really enjoyed those little moments.

Building a Crush House

Speaking of props, you can buy them and place them at night using cash earned from ads. When you’re not filming during the day, a loop of ads will run on your camcorder. Each one has a base amount of money it will award, plus bonuses if the ad is particularly interesting to your current audience roster. It’s a little mini-game to play as you’re running around, looking for those dramatic moments.

I would like the balancing act, except like I said before, I was usually panicking to ensure I could satisfy all the audiences I had before day’s end. (God, I’ve spent so long just filming pipes and toilets for plumbers.) The rush meant I was spending most of the early day into the evening filming whatever I could to pop icons up, and then using any remaining time to stand there and loop ads to build revenue. A replica lighthouse, made in the image of the real lighthouse, is not going to buy itself, and it ain’t cheap either.

So, I spent a lot of time in The Crush House running around, panicked about whether I could appease my audiences in time. Frequently, I’d linger on an objectively abysmal shot of the actual action just to keep the meters I had ticking up. I do really like the challenges that the audience system puts on the player, but it feels like they mandate filming specific objects and popping up the most icons possible, rather than actually following the reality drama. At some point, the plot feels lost.

I could easily see how gradually building up a collection of props and interactable items could make it easier to sate the audiences. And I could see the meta-narrative of this game slowly pushing me through to see its end. But in its first four hours or so, The Crush House feels like an interesting project, and a fascinating concept, that gets bogged down by its stringent requirements. It might play into its creepy meta-story, that trying to follow a specific plot or line can be detrimental to getting the best ratings and staying on the air, but in practice, it just shifts the focus away from what brought me to The Crush House in the first place.

The Crush House is out now on PC via Steam.