How To Play The Crush House – All Mechanics Explained

The Crush House is a 90’s themed reality TV show simulator developed by Nerial and published by Devolver Digital. It has all the tools to appeal to an in-game audience who’re watching four hand-picked cast members loving, hating, humiliating, humoring, flirting, and fighting each other. Your job is to record moments that appeal to the particular type of audience you have tuned into an episode. Let’s break down all the mechanics of the game to help you learn how to play the Crush House.

Premise

Running a 90s reality TV show as the man behind the camera, watching the cast react to each other on and off camera, and laughing over the silly comments of the viewers as they watch the squabbles of the people on set is the premise of The Crush House.

Your task is to make the show successful, and the only way to do that is to retain and satisfy your audience, which comes in various flavors. There are students, plumbers, flora lovers, house moms, and more who love watching a reality TV show, especially the saucy ones like The Crush House.

You have a limited budget and a week to run your show and see the season reach a conclusion by the end of it. If you don’t, the show will be canceled. You can repeat a failed day where you could not satisfy the minimum required audiences, but any more failures will ultimately lead to game over (depending on your difficulty).

Cast Selection

The cast is one of the important elements of The Crush House. You get to pick four people out of twelve while using your computer for the entirety of a season.

You will find all sorts of cast members of both male and female, but all are bi-sexual, so they can couple with basically anyone. Some nerds are into ska music, keeping bookworm collections, and don’t like oversharing with the people they dislike.

You will also find drama queens, the talking types who can’t wait to spit it out and bond with other people, especially if ‘their crazy matches others’ crazy.’

But at the end of the day, YOU get to pick the cast. Your computer lists the likes and dislikes of all 12 potential cast members, but you need to shortlist only the four. You could pick a completely dysfunctional group and then watch them fight over little talks throughout the weak.

Or, you could potentially pick four people who connect and bond with each other instantly from the get-go. It all boils down to the ‘Likes & Dislikes’ of the casting talent.

Once you have finalized your cast, the rules of the game are simple: do not speak to the talent, and the audience is always right. When all four cast members are on The Crush House set, you cannot speak to anyone during the day.

However, come night, you can interact with the cast member who’s available to chat. Sometimes they will ask for favors/tasks for the next day. Then again, it is your camera and your show. You can decline a case member’s request or accept it. If you do the latter, then try to complete the objective too on the next day.

Audience Types

While the cast members are one side of the coin, the audience is another. Quenching their thirst and meeting their satisfaction are just about the two things you can actively do for your audiences, and there are 35 types of them.

Every time you end the day, you get to see what kind of audiences are expected to watch The Crush House show tomorrow. There is a student audience type who likes to see various camera angles as apparently, they dig this!

Then, there are landscape audience types who are interested in the flora of The Crush Hosue set. You don’t even have to film people but the plants to satisfy this audience type.

Reality TV shows are bound to catch the attention of all types of audiences, including the saucy, and dirty ones and the same is the case for The Crush House. We found three naughty audience types while playing the game.

There is an audience type that just like to see the girls on the show. Then some are interested in watching buttocks irrespective of gender. Whatever the audience types are, your job at the end of the day is to keep the audience satisfied and give them what they want on the show.

Whatever you show when you go LIVE, if you manage to satisfy at least three types of audiences in a single frame, you will get ‘On Fire” status. This is also visible by golden lines radiating as you maintain your lucky shot.

The On Fire status lasts until three or more audience types are satisfied. If it disappears, you will need to find another angle that can potentially capture the interest of multiple audience types. This gets easier as you progress the episodes as there will be more audience types to satisfy in a day.

Ad Money And Buying Props

You also get to run Ads and generate some income for set upgrades. The Ads run automatically every time you are not live during the day. Every Ad that you show repeatedly loses value over time in terms of generating money for you.

When the day ends and the cast returns to their room, you can visit the set and buy some props at night. These are permanent and are even carried over to the next seasons of the Crush House.

The Success Slide! or The Failure Elevator

If you satisfy the required amount of audience in each episode till the Season Finale, all of the cast will go down The Success Slide. You’ll be filming then as they’ll do some wholesome banter celebrating the success of the Crush House season success. After that, they’ll go down The Success Slide one by one marking the end of the season and starting the next one.

However, if you fail to please audiences, the cast will leave the way back they came the elevator under the pool. After they’ve left, you’ll be fired, and the PA will ask you to step into the elevator. The elevator will lead you to a room with the Failure Elevator that you’ll slide down, marking the cancellation of the Crush House show. Depending on the difficulty, you can either retry that particular episode or you’ll have to replay the whole season.

Check out our review for the Crush House if you’re planning to buy it or want to hear our opinion on the game.