izigame.me

The Crush House is a game with a major identity crisis, it's trying to be many things at the same time and as such falls short of securely executing any of the three.

The first thing it is attempting to be is a Pokemon-Snap-like set in a reality TV house, which is a really great concept. You film the contestants in the house and try to meet various audience demands of what they want to see. However, because the game also wants to be a procedural Sims-like dynamic relationship system (see below) you can't always guarantee you'll be able to film a particular thing (for instance, no romance might happen if everyone is enemies that day). Therefore, over half of the audience demands are for completely static features of the house, like the plumbing or gardens. This is sort of funny the first time it comes up, it's silly to be filming a garden while drama is happening, but what ends up emerging is that for consistent results, you end up pursuing the static objectives (if you fail, you get a game over after all), and you mostly ignore the reality TV part of the game and just cycle through the same maximum-points generating spots/camera angles that you've discovered.

The second thing it wants to be is a sort of Sims-like dynamic system where people fall in love, become enemies, and have silly conversations while you watch. Each contestant has a relationship with the others, and can be Enemies, Strangers, Friends, Flirting, or a Couple. There are several time-changes throughout the day where this can change, usually through a conversation. The game really cares about this system, and in much of its advertising really pushes the idea that you want to cast the show with certain personalities together that might meld or clash. Unfortunately, this does not really end up mattering and people will get together and break-up semi-randomly no matter what. The system becomes fairly transparent after awhile: the different characters have certain backend traits like "nerd" or "egotistical" and different canned conversations for different situations emerge when those tagged characters interact. I've heard the same breakup routine between two sets of completely different characters, the same flirting, etc. etc. Also because of the proceduralism, each relationship change is entirely self-contained. Nothing else that has happened in the house has any bearing on if two people stay together or break-up, which I suppose is a bit of the satire of the game. If it means to show that reality TV dynamics are thin, it certainly succeeds!

Finally, the game wants to be a sci-fi mystery where you are discovering a dark secret truth. This is where the game truly fumbles the most. The way I've made sense of this is that this mystery element must have been added begrudgingly, because the game seems to loathe to interact with it or pay it off in any meaningful ways. I feel like the developers wanted to make a game that was much more of the first two concepts but felt a mystery was needed either for "depth" (which I disagree with, personally, I would have loved that game) or to make it more "Devolver"-y. I don't want to spoil the mystery here, but if you play and you feel excited or interested by the breadcrumbs that are dropped: don't be. Many things are never returned to, and the endings are huge fumbles of potential. There's an ARG element that I haven't interacted with, but I shouldn't need to in order to feel good about a game I've played, I'd hope. I would have rather there been no mystery at all and more energy put into the other parts of the game.

I think this is much better as an art show/arcade game. Just have people play through one week, have it get increasingly harder and add in strange new audiences every time (there are a lot of fun ones the first time you see them!), and end it there at a tight experience. This is a game that's worth playing but absolutely not worth finishing.