The Crush House Is a Playable Version of a ‘90s Reality TV Show With a Dark Twist

04.04.2024 - 16:07 / ign.com

When I was a kid, I removed the ladder from my Sims' pool while they were blissfully doing their morning laps. They drowned, as expected, and drama ensued. I didn't do this to be mean, but to tug on my Sims' attachments to develop a tragic story. Though those stories are easier to manufacture in today's iterations of The Sims, few other games allow you to put personalities together and shake them up to see what happens. Enter The Crush House. Like The Sims, The Crush House allows players to engineer drama by casting four people with defined strengths and flaws to star in a 1999 reality TV show. Unlike The Sims, The Crush House's gameplay is more passive in how you directly impact the character's interactions as you take the role of the show's producer and camera person. Though the demo I received during GDC was hands-off, I'm excited to see not only how much chaos I'll be able to witness when The Crush House is out later this year, but also uncover a mystery that plagues the shadows of the pink mansion.

The Crush House is a "thirst-person shooter" where players take up a camera to film their four out of 12 chosen cast members' actions around a hot pink house filled with activities. What they need to film depends on the day's current audience. The first day featured Crush fans, meaning they were easy to please simply by filming the cast doing anything. The second audience was landscaping lovers, described as people who might be into HGTV garden shows but happen to be watching the start of a new reality TV show instead. The primary goal of The Crush House is to satisfy the viewership craving for any combination of its 35 audience types. So, while rating points for Crush fans were earned by simply showcasing the cast, the landscaping lovers' satisfaction only rose when plants were featured, meaning the cast didn't even need to be in a shot for them to be happy.

Failing to complete the required satisfaction meters for the day's audiences results in a game over, though you can retry the day to keep the season going or restart from the beginning. Audience satisfaction requirements get more challenging to meet as the game goes on with up to six different audiences needing to be pleased. I didn't see them in action, but The Crush House Director Nicole He told me about audiences like Suburban Moms who like a flirty male cast member, Emile, and food-related content. There's also the activist audience who dislike the show for being fake and exploitative, but to satisfy them, they need to be shown things that prove their point.

An in-game week constitutes a season and The Crush Houses' underlying mystery can be solved in about four seasons but can continue to be played after the core mystery is solved. Given that