The Crush House – the sexy and creepy 90's

If an indie game has a seemingly happy, fun, and exciting veneer you know you're in for a twist: actually there's something really weird and disturbing going on.

In The Crush House you're producing a 90's dating show where four singles get together and make friends — or enemies. Producing means you film the show trying to capture moments the audience wants to see and run ads whenever you can to gain funds to furnish the titular house further. A season lasts five days, each day giving you a chance to not only film the show but to complete quests the participants give you. Everything is pastel and everything is sort of a joke. That's how you know something dark is gonna go down.



Under the hood The Crush House is a pretty systemic game. The audience reacts to things on screen and by showing a certain segment a thing they like you grow their level of satisfaction with the show. Satisfying three or more segments simultaneously sets the show on fire and the viewers start to feed on each other. Trying to please as many segments as possible at the same time and trying to find ways to abuse the system is a definite higlight of the game. Some people watching have funny specific needs such as the Butt Guys, Libertarians and Plumbers. Getting to frame someone's ass (Butt Guys) while they're next to a Tiki torch (Libertarians) and squeezing in a corner of the pool (Plumbers) was always gratifying.

As fun as abusing the system was, I found myself pretty quickly trying to do things as efficiently as I could. I would quickly max out every audience segment's need (thus making sure the show doesn't get canceled) and then just run ads the rest of the day. This would net me enough money to always buy what I wanted. With the audience being random every day things never got stale and I always had to do a lot of thinking to find a way of pleasing everyone fast.



About that dark twist, I think we've all been here before. The participants are actually clones and the show has been running in a loop since god knows how long. It's implied that after every season the clones get squashed into Crush Juice which is then consumed by the next season's singles. The player character is a clone too and your original (as the game calls the people who are cloned) is responsible for all the weird stuff. The game has two endings which seem to be almost the same one with a hint that this is not the last we hear of The Crush House.