Equipped with a camera and complete control over what viewers see in a Big Brother-style reality TV house, you play the chief producer of The Crush House. What you record has to be good, and how you play it in front of thirsty fans or romantic live audiences is also up to you. But while the toolbox seems exciting at first glance, The Crush House is quickly slowed down by a points system that spoils the fun.

At the beginning of each season of The Crush Housechoose the four housemates from a cast who enter the house through an exciting entrance via a tunnel in the swimming pool. One by one, they drop a one-liner to show some of their personality, and you can watch those who have already entered on the fringes as they display Sims-like reactions to their feelings for each new housemate.

Once you have the four housemates, you have seven days to keep the show on the air. Each day there are different types of viewers and you have to try to please them. Cinephiles want crazy camera angles; voyeurs want everything filmed from a distance; gourmet want… food and butts and feet, well, people want you to film butts and feet. On paper, this sounds like a good idea. Until you’re trying to please that many people in one day of filming, and until you fail for the first time in the day, it’s entertaining to run around and zoom in on your roommates’ butts to see the thirsty Twitch-like live chat at the side of the screen explaining how happy they are. But with different types of people asking about different things, I found myself paying less and less attention to what was happening to the four roommates and more focused on filming trees from odd angles or lighthouses I’d placed in the backyard to score points so I could end the day with a sufficient score.

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In between days, when the housemates move into their sleeping quarters, you can go out and buy items to put in the house. The money you spend on these will come from ads that you can run when you stop recording with the camera. You’re encouraged to make the most of the downtime between dramas in the house to run as many ads as possible. Of course, if you run too many, you’ll miss the action and won’t make ends meet.

But the core story that The Crush House there’s also something happening between days, as you hear whispers about communicating with secret characters and agree to secretly do odd jobs for roommates. The growing sense that “reality show overlords are bad?” seems to be the game’s core message. Sort of. Because as much as that’s the drip-feed of support for everything that’s happening here, there’s also a lot of love for the genre here. And when the game offers two different endings depending on your choice, it seems to be for the people who are against reality TV or those who are more like, “Hey, I like good reality TV, but segregated overlords kind of ruined it.”

There is a choice right at the beginning The Crush House before the game starts, you will either have more fun or not. One is the recommended difficulty, where you can fail for a day if you don’t satisfy all the fans online, and the other is a more casual setting where you don’t failIf you choose the recommended setting, you will be disappointed, as I was, because the game gets too caught up in its own systems and spoils the fun it initially promises. By the time I had finished the fifth season of the series and was working on unlocking the game’s ending, I was just going through the motions; I didn’t care about the characters, I didn’t care about the fans, I just wanted it to end. But maybe that’s the point.

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