The Crush House
A Rough Diamond
This post is part of the regular feature ‘Let Me Talk To You About,’ where I ramble about creative works of any medium. You can fine tune which emails you recieve by clicking here. Today I’m talking about an indie game I have mixed feelings on.
The problem with trying things that are genuinely new is the lack of prior examples to build off of, to be experimental is to accept a bit of clunk and roughness as a trade off.
This came to mind when playing The Crush House, a video game where you play as the camerawoman/producer for the titular reality TV show about four people spending a week in the same house. You pick the cast from a pool of twelve candidates, spend the day walking around the house filming them, set things up for the next day at night, and continue until next season gives you a new cast.
The difficulty of the game comes from its audience and ad system. Each day has its own random group of audience demographics you must please by filming what they want, which ranges from the expected like drama lovers to people who want you to focus on water features or landscaping. Once you get enough points for an audience, they are considered sated for the day, and you need to sate enough audiences each day to progress.
On top of that you also need gaps in filming to air ads, which will let you earn money to buy props for the house that make pleasing the myriad audiences easier. Buying props is your main way to strategize for how to handle the upcoming days, and they carry over between seasons thankfully.
But this isn’t just pure reality TV simulation, there’s a plot that is progressed by clearing sidequests for the cast, which require you to film or not film certain things. For example one character wants you to avoid filming them smoking for a day and film them working out to set a good image for their parents,. After enough sidequests you’ll begin to uncover the truth behind the show.
It’s a rather distinctive game, I can’t easily compare it to others I have played. Generally it’s about running around the house to get the best shots possible, trying to keep track of where each cast member is to avoid missing out on something potentially juicy. It rewards awareness of your enviornment.
However, due to how absurd some of the audiences are and the randomization of which ones you have for the day, it’s incredibly easy to get a set up that penalizes actually trying to film the cast. At one point I was stuck, unable to please enough audiences to progress, until I abandoned the idea of actually trying to include the cast in my footage and just filmed different spots in the house, which let me finally progress.
Even if the audience doesn’t, I would like to see what drama the cast of the show is getting into, especially since the narrative wants you to care about them to some extent. But instead I’m stuck filming the lighthouses because experience has taught me anything else will make me redo the entire day. The optimal strategy is at odds with how it feels the game should play with its premise, and not using it has too much risk.
I played the game on the normal difficulty setting as the game stated it was the intended experience, but I wonder if it might be better on the easier difficulty where you don’t need to please audiences to progress. The challenge of lining up the right shots for the set of audiences was nice, but took away from the fantasy of the game a little too often.
Thankfully the cast member sidequests generally force you to maintain awareness of the cast so you know if you’ll have a chance to fulfill it even when your audience for the day are plumbers, landscaping enthuisasts, art lovers, and pyromaniacs.
And quenching the specficic audiences thirsts can sometimes be a bit of interesting puzzle to solve. It took me until around the final day of the game to notice something that had been in the background the entire time that was key to pleasing certain demographics, finally observing it was a standout moment. That felt like a clever piece of design.
I also had a nice moment of irony when a character discussed how they left their modeling career due to being oversexualized while my camera was fully zoomed in on their ass because I needed to please the butt lover demographic. That was another highlight of my playthrough
And once it got going I was hooked on the plot of the game, especially when the reveal I saw coming was done in a way that I especially liked. It had me excited to see where things were going. Then the ending came with a choice to make, and after seeing both outcomes I immediately reloaded to figure out what I needed to do to see the true ending. Only a little bit in did it occur to me to google if there was a third ending, and it turned out there wasn’t.
Normally video games commonly accused of having bad endings actually don’t, people are just mad it wasn’t a feel good ending. The Crush House’s endings disappointed me because they felt incomplete, lacking in catharsis. It’s not even the actual sequence of events that disappoint me, its the abruptness of it, how rushed it felt. A moment I had been eagerly anticpating simply came and went.
So if you’re willing to accept the roughness that comes with venturing off the beaten path, I would recommend The Crush House. It’s flawed in a way where I still consider it more valuable and worthy of discussion than yet another paint by numbers member of a well established genre.