For those who grew up in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Big Brother was a seminal text. The reality TV format of “attractive people living together, causing drama” has long since peaked, but there are elements of nostalgia in the classic format. Crush House, a new game from Nerial (Reigns, Card Shark) and Devolver Digital aims to bottle that nostalgia, inviting players to produce their very own 90s-era reality TV show with plenty of hot people, and plenty of drama.
In Crush House, you are a producer hired to work on new seasons of Crush House, an in-universe reality show set in a Malibu mansion filled with “drama, fighting, tension, and romance.” In your role, you must meet audience demand by curating your cast of reality heroes, mixing personalities together, and then capturing all the action as it plays out.
Your audience wants drama and high stakes, so you’ll need to cater to their desires, and attempt to grab the largest slice of the game’s reality TV audience to avoid being cancelled.
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While you balance your ratings, you’ll also need to be thinking about money through sponsorships and advertising, ensuring you earn enough cash to keep going, while also maximising the tiffs taking place on your Malibu set.
It’s also worth mentioning… the horrors.
While Crush House appears to be a show about drama and relationships, there is also something more sinister lurking within your set. As Nerial and Devolver Digital describe: “There’s more to The Crush House than meets the eye, and a sinister mystery to uncover.”
Between days of filming, you’ll be able to explore the Crush House set at night, talking quietly with the cast members and exploring strange corners to figure out “the many dark and twisted secrets of The Crush House.”
With a neat dose of creepiness and light-hearted fun, there’s plenty to analyse in the world of Crush House. For now, the game doesn’t have a firm release date, but it’s planned for launch on PC later in 2024.
