Though you can track the origins of reality TV back to the 1940s with radio and short films for TV, the 70s and 80s spawned something closer to what we know now. However, it wasn’t until John de Mol Jr created the Dutch show, Big Brother, in 1999 that we get what we know today and the blend of reality TV/game shows. Nerial and Devolver Digital take that format and setting, turning it on its head with a Malibu Stacy Dream House with a whole lot of queer overtones, and dark mystery undertones in a broad arching story.

You play producer/camera person, Jae Jimenez Jung. It is your job to capture all the gossip, action, romance, and otherwise to satisfy the audience which in turn satisfies the network and doesn’t get you canceled. That’s in the TV sense, not your weird uncle who’d tell you that you’re mentally ill for playing a game with queer characters’ sense of canceled. Set at the tail end of the 90s, The Crush House has you filming, producing, and making the trashy reality TV we know today.

Not very complicated, you are simply running around trying to film everything that goes on during a week and in doing so you are satisfying your bosses which gets you a second, third, fourth, and fifth season. With only four contestants at a time, The Crush House stays really simple with its premise: You are just a producer, your job is to film the action and don’t talk to the cast, run ads between bouts of action, make money, improve the show, and satisfy the audiences. At least it sounds simple, but in reality, there is a bit more to it than that.

Running for only five days at a time, the show is live during the day, and on Saturdays, you broadcast the season finale. Maybe I’ll do a Russell T Davies and after years of calling it a season, I’ll change to the other word commonly used in place of that. Played a bit more like a Rogue-lite of sorts, each series acts as a “new run in the dungeon.” You select a new cast (maybe the same cast) but the house, furniture you buy in prior series, cast tasks, and even the cast’s knowledge of which series it is remains.

Though you are told not to talk to the cast, in the middle of the night you might get a chance to. Like all reality TV stars, everyone from Coco to Alex, Diya to Ayo, and even Gunther are catty, attention-seeking, melodramatic divas who all have someone or something to prove right or wrong. Charlie, for example, has grandparents and young cousins (I think) watching, so don’t point the camera up anyone’s cheeks. No, not the ones that are parted by a tongue, unless you are very lucky with your partner of choice. Though some are less annoying and pedantic about getting things perfect.

The majority of the time it is just “buy me a thing then film me” or simply “film me being/not being a horrible/good person.” You know the fake parasocial nonsense we see and complain “reality” TV is because the word reality in there is about as fake as one of the star’s breasts/bum. As it turns out this perpetual 1999 is just as fake as the Cardassians and their peace accord with the Bajorans, or you know those other ones that are parasites on humanity and suck out our will to live. However, completing tasks does something else.

After a season or two and you’ve completed a task, there is a mysterious couple that starts talking to you through the radio that you use to talk to your assistant. An assistant you never see but is always directing/bringing orders down the chain of command. If you end up helping the cast look good or in Ayo’s case look as toxic as George Galloway, John McCririck, and Pete Burns in one woman. Maybe that’s a bit harsh, two of them are dead and one should be as quiet as someone who is, but she does maybe need someone to tell her she’s a little bit toxic.

Digression aside, if you help them, the mysterious two “voices” start telling you something more about the darker undertones of The Crush House (the show within the game, not the game itself). Part of me doesn’t want to spoil a large portion of this story arc because it is something worth playing on your own, though I will say that it is similarly critical of the reality TV machine we see “coming to CBS this fall” or wherever Big Brother is now in the UK too after Channel 4 cut it.

I like the story, I think there is a reality to it that reality TV no longer has, but at the same time, I also want to beat people to a bloody pulp with my camcorder some of the time. While the animations are fine and smooth for the most part, I’ve seen a couple of contestants bumping into each other. The Crush House has a problem a lot of RPGs that don’t have to sync up to voice lines have. The reason I put the word voices in quotation marks above is that everyone talks like Tom Nook and his mafia pals, mumbling something that isn’t quite a language.

As a result, when you end up talking to the contestants at night – never talk to contestants – they do all these animations to show their personality. The one that stands out is Diyo. Diyo will ask you not to film her smoking, meanwhile during your conversation, she’ll end up smoking a pallet full of boxes of cigarettes, and each one taking a few seconds to light, bring to her mouth, and the smoke to waft about. As a personality thing, that’s pretty good and funny as a joke. The problem is that it also stops her from talking further until she’s had a drag of her lung cancer sticks.

For the most part that’s not a major issue. However, when you are unable to complete a contestant task for a while, they may want to talk to you again and I’ve had Alex in particular go over the same dialog. Now, for the most part, that isn’t an issue though eventually you’ll get sick of reading the same dialog and just try skipping it. That’s where these longer animations that stop the dialog boxes from popping up are annoying. Though on the fact there are only dialog boxes, there aren’t any accessibility options, especially for wobbly text.

In fact, the options are not non-existent but are certainly limited in scope. Your only graphical options are Vsync on or off and Fullscreen on or off, there are volume sliders but we take those for granted now anyway, and thank the baby Jebuz that there are FOV sliders for both your normal look and the camera zoom. That said, there is very little else to speak of, and thankfully the performance as I’ve seen it hasn’t been terrible. An occasional frame dropped here or there and loading stutter, but little else.

However, to stay on the technical side, I think we need to talk about the camera. While it isn’t all too important or something that a lot of people might be concerned with it is fairly pick-up and play as you point, shoot, zoom, and maybe “lock” in on a contestant which allows you to do a little bit of a tilt or pan up. Those of you who’ve ever had to faff around with a Zoom call and cameras know that the focus must be automatic, which would be a great assumption. Given my hornyness for car porn and photo modes in general in the likes of F1 and other titles, The Crush House is rather basic.

To a degree I get it. The focus of The Crush House isn’t that you direct a perfect shot or get the right aperture for a special moment, but all the same, you aren’t negatively impacted by unfocused, extremely wide shots of those kisses or fights. You could argue that you are if you aren’t gaining points that feed audience approval, but if I’m honest some of that seems arbitrary. The audiences you need to satisfy every day demand certain things like film majors demanding every shot be set in a tumble drier like it was Star Trek: Discovery’s first two episodes.

Then you have the more pedant of audiences such as the motion-sick crew that moan if you move the camera too much or zoom too quickly, the voyeurs who want long, isolated shots, and of course the easily satisfied foot fetishists. Oddly enough you even have Libertarians shouting some very 2024 right-wing things about media in 1999: How the “libs” need to be owned, laws don’t apply to “TV libs,” and so on. Some things are quite on-point and funny, and others are trying hard to appease someone that I don’t think is really playing The Crush House.

Audiences need to be satisfied but they also want shots to be kept fresh. Something that can often be difficult to ascertain as to why you are gaining points towards satisfying the fish people one minute and not the next despite fish being clearly visible is beyond me. Yes, clear visual indicators show when a shot is satisfying an audience, and loose comments to the right of the screen tell you what they want sometimes, but it is occasionally difficult to work out why something works for only a couple of seconds then is failing for a few more, only to satisfy again for some reason.

It isn’t about good, clean direction as we understand it in modern Western film, TV, and beyond. The reason you see (in a good direction) that the character progressing towards their goal faces, walks, or looks to the right is because we read left to right, and there isn’t a way to respect that in The Crush House without massive amounts of foresight into what everyone is doing and a whole lot of coding magic. That sense of direction is fast and loose, for obvious reasons and that’s perfectly fine. I like the approach Nerial and The Crush House goes with.

Sometimes it means the plant lovers, conspiracy theorists, and plumbers are rubbing the inside of their pockets without sight of the cast, and that’s quite immersion-breaking. However, at the same time, it can be a blessing as the network demands you satisfy several different audiences at once while cutting away to make some money off of ads. There is a constant build to that sort of pressure and the threat of being canceled is certainly there. Nonetheless, if you’re looking to get the whole story you might have to switch to an easy mode or start a lot of new saves.

Playing multiple series and changing up the cast regularly, you’ll quickly realize the personality of each character is more so in their mannerisms, looks, and conversations with you that you totally secretly don’t have. Otherwise, dialog during the show is interchangeable between all twelve castmates, making that dialog about as interesting to pay attention to as what might be in the distance of long shots. That said, every one of them is queer as folk (but without the L and O), if you get what I mean, as they are hornier than rabbits in a brothel.

The parade of the pristine plastic paradise is wonderful in not only its execution but also how The Crush House is a commentary on the industry as a whole surrounding reality TV. Despite occasional moments where the plastic smile falls and the jagged edges of The Crush House lay, it is a fantastic lampoon of the very thing it is commenting on while providing engaging enough gameplay in the fore. Ultimately, it is difficult to find flaws (though there are some) in this perfectly manicured and maintained fiction of reality created to entertain and gawk at.

A PC review copy of The Crush House was provided by Devolver Digital for this review.

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The Crush House

$16.99

8.5

Score

8.5/10

Pros

• Great commentary on reality TV.
• A fantastic look overall.

Cons

• Accessibility and options are an afterthought.
• I wish the camera was a little more complex for more interesting shots.