In The Crush House, chaos is in the camera

I’m not supposed to speak to the four-person cast of The Crush House, but when they’re asking for favors — late at night, when the cameras are off — it’s hard to say no. One shy cast member of the in-game reality TV show wants to project a persona into the world that’ll surprise people: They want me to film them making friends and enemies. Another cast member doesn’t want her parents to see her smoking, and she wants me to turn my camera off when she’s got a cigarette in hand. Then there’s the person who wants to prove to her mom that she’s hot stuff (??), which means showing her kissing two separate people. As Jae, the cameraperson and producer, I play a big role in how these people are portrayed to our growing audience; I shape their narrative by what I choose to film, and what I don’t. But I’m also still at the whims of my bosses — i.e., advertisers — and the audience, both of whom dictate whether the show will get canned.

Created by developer Nerial and published by Devolver Digital, The Crush House — not the in-game show, but the eponymous game released on Aug. 9 — gamifies the dating reality TV show experience but switches up the perspective. “[Former Nerial creative director Arnaud de Bock and I] were both obsessed with this reality show called Terrace House,” creative director Nicole He told Polygon. “That’s where the spark of the original idea came out.”

Terrace House — a Japanese Netflix show — doesn’t have a ton of big, splashy drama, so while it was the spark of the original idea, The Crush House doesn’t look much like it. “We had to trash it up,” He said.

And trash it up they did. The Crush House is more clearly inspired by Western reality TV shows known for messy drama, like Love Island or The Real World. (It’s also influenced by “There Will Come Soft Rains” by Ray Bradbury and “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream” by Harlan Ellison, senior narrative designer Daisy Fernandez told Polygon. Fernandez said the inspiration from these texts counterpoints the “bubblegum, hyperactive chaos” of the game with “the messy darkness that’s happening underneath it all.”)

The Crush House is played in weeklong seasons where the player is to film four strangers meeting, living, loving, and hating together in a Barbie-meets-vaporwave mansion. Mechanically, this means picking up a video camera and starting to film. The catch is that you have to balance the wants of viewership with playing ads, and then, later, assisting the cast with their requests, too.

Viewers are lumped into different categories, all several dozen of which want something different out of the show: Voyeurs want to feel like the cast doesn’t know they’re watching. Plumbers are interested in pipes — literal pipes and plumbing, like the toilet or a sink (even better if a cast member is using one). You can guess what Butt Guys want. As days go on and seasons progress, players need to meet the needs of more and more audience types while earning money by airing ads. With the money, you can buy different props to place around the house, which in turn help meet different audience needs. So if I want to please gardeners, I can add a watering can. Filming a person watering the flowers is then the, uh, money shot.

If you don’t meet the viewers’ needs at the end of a day of filming, your version of The Crush House is immediately taken off the air. Poof, it’s gone — then you can start the season over. If you do meet audience expectations, you’ll move on to the next day of the weeklong season. All the while, there’s a narrative arc around the cast members and the house itself, which plays out between camera shots. It’s less like watching an episode of Love Island and more like perusing the show’s deleted scenes, Fernandez said. “With Love Island, it wasn’t so much the actual episodes of the show, because they’re edited in a way where they just talk about their attraction to each other,” Fernandez said. “You don’t really see the interpersonal moments that’s edited out.” You see that when you watch the deleted scenes, though, she said.

I find reality TV shows the most compelling when I’m thinking about what’s happening when the cameras are off. The Crush House iterates on that idea. “A lot of the appeal is wondering about what’s going on behind the scenes, like theorizing about how producers are manipulating the show, or what kind of edit somebody might be getting that’s not reflective of the true situation,” He said. “Who are you as this [producer]? [Is] the distance right between you and the cast members? How can we explore that from a narrative perspective and make it interesting to serve that larger mystery?”

In playing The Crush House, I see myself making those sorts of decisions that prioritize giving viewers what they want over, say, filming reality. For the most part, I don’t actually care at all about what the cast members are doing or who they’re doing it with — they might as well be just walking, talking setpieces that make the numbers go up. Sometimes, I don’t even have to film anyone at all, because my various props do the trick, like focusing on a firepit to satisfy the Pyromaniacs. A firepit plus a bench to sit on (for the Nursing Home Residents) and a still, unmoving shot (to ease the pain of the motion-sick viewers) is even better, because I get a bonus for making three different types of viewers happy with one shot. It seems like this is what Nerial was going for with its commentary on reality TV, but bending solely to ads and the viewers’ desires also makes playing the game less compelling. Of course, Love Island would be much less compelling if it catered to audiences the way The Crush House does — but that’s the whole point. The Crush House is taking the perception of reality TV and turning it up to 1,000.

During filming, a dark science fiction mystery about the origins of the house and the show unfolds as I break the rules and interact with the cast after hours.

The problem is that to help the cast with their various problems, usually related to how they want to appear on screen, I have to film certain things — which doesn’t wildly change the way I’ve been interacting with the world thus far. It is another thing to balance against viewership and running ads, but it doesn’t meaningfully impact or sway me toward anything different. Ultimately, I’m still just looking to optimize scenes for maximal points; say, if one character doesn’t want her ass on screen, I’ll just shoot her from the front. Cast member needs are just another thing I have to do to progress the story, and they don’t necessarily develop the cast members as characters or add a ton of complexity to gameplay.

“The idea that the player character is complicit with this larger structure, which is a light spoiler, chewing and spitting out these cast members… we didn’t want to bang the player on the head with anything didactic about the morals of reality TV, but it’s definitely an interesting area — the relationship between the producer and the cast,” Fernandez said.

I’m several hours (and seasons) into The Crush House at this point, and I find that it’s become more compelling to play over time; The layers of it all, be it the viewership demands or the creepy (and literal) underworld storyline, come together in a way that makes the game’s repetitive elements feel more interesting. It’s in those repetitive moments — you do the same things every day — that The Crush House feels like the concept is doing more work than the game itself. The level of intrigue — whether that’s simply wanting to see all the weird viewership groups and what pleases them or a morbid curiosity in what forces keep The Crush House on TV — keeps me coming back regardless.

The Crush House was released Aug. 9 on Windows PC. The game was reviewed on Windows PC using a download code provided by Devolver Digital. Vox Media has affiliate partnerships. These do not influence editorial content, though Vox Media may earn commissions for products purchased via affiliate links. You can find additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.