Crush House review for PC

I’ve never been a huge reality TV fan. I’m not going to pretend I’m above it all – I watched Survivor for years after it stopped being popular, and I definitely watched the odd episode of The Amazing Race or The Apprentice back in the day – but I never really went in for shows built around trashiness and manufactured confrontation.

As a result, I’m not hugely fluent in the shows that Crush House is meant to be satirizing. It’s supposed to be a satire (parody? Loving pastiche?) of late-’90s/early-’00s dating shows, full of the kind of twentysomething archetypes that populate dating reality shows – and one that, I’ll confess, I probably missed some of the nuances of, to the extent those shows had nuances.

Mind you, I’m not sure how much this matters. Crush House describes itself as a “thirst-person shooter,” which is really just a clever way of saying it’s like Pokémon Snap, if Pokémon Snap ratcheted up the smut factor by several degrees. It’s not like you see anything too crazy in Crush House beyond bikinis, intense public make-outs, and some language that might make some prudes blush, but the general idea is there.

Or, at least, it wants to be. The problem with Crush House is that it has a decent idea – you’re producing the titular gameshow, and you’re gradually discovering something sinister is going on behind the scenes – except it’s buried that good idea beneath a less fun idea: specifically, that you’re going to do all the tasks of a reality show producer, and do your sleuthing on the side.

On the one hand, I get it: if the developers had just made a straightforward investigative game where you don’t have to go through the motions of making a TV show, stretching that idea beyond a few hours might’ve been challenging. On the other hand, however, Crush House makes you go through season after season of its show, forcing you to do the same tasks over and over again. Officially this is to help you uncover the secrets behind the show, but when you get down to it, it still means that the balance of “investigating” and “filming a reality TV show” is hugely tilted towards the latter.

It’s not impossible to imagine that a game about filming a reality show could be fun, mind you. It’s easy to imagine that if the game had some tight scripting and voice acting, it could really push you into its world of wondering what, really, is happening behind the scenes. Unfortunately, Crush House has neither of those things – instead, the best you get are a bunch of random characters talking in all the clichéd ways you associate with reality dating shows, speaking a language that sounds kind of like Simlish.

More broadly, you spend a lot of time in Crush House thinking of ways to make the audience happy. There are a few dozen audiences you need to keep tuned into the show, and you do that by appealing to their specific niche – some that are obvious (Suburban Housewives love drama, while Butt Guys obviously love butts), some less so (Landscaping Lovers and Plumbers really want you to film flowers and bathroom fixtures, respectively). While some of this plays into the game’s overarching plot, at the end of the day, when you’re told that Conspiracy Theorists really want to see the show’s Success Slide for two solid minutes, the fact is you’re sitting there filming an inanimate object for two full minutes.

Maybe, deep down, this is all just a meta-commentary on what happens when you add gamification to the already depressing world of reality dating shows. Like, not only do you have a genre that’s widely reviled, Crush House makes you do soul-crushing tasks in order to maximize your score.

But whether you’re doing those soul-crushing tasks in a meta way or not, the game is still making you do them – and making you do them over and over again to uncover a secret that, really, isn’t all that interesting. Crush House tries its hardest to make it all seem fascinating, but, ultimately, there’s just not enough here to make it so.

Devolver Digital provided us with a Crush House PC code for review purposes.