Last night on Married At First Sight Australia, Eden revealed she’d be hiding a terrible secret. Another bride – who I won’t reveal because SPOILERS, obviously – had texted her asking if she could borrow a top, so she could wear it to… .
The Crush House previewDeveloper: NerialPublisher: Devolver DigitalPlatform: PCAvailability: Out TBC on PC (Steam)
Shocking! Although honestly, for MAFS it’s actually not that shocking at all. A couple of episodes ago, at the weekly dinner party, a man – who always seems to be just moderately sunburnt – told another man to “put a muzzle on your wife”. Another guy decided to call it quits straight after the first week honeymoon because his match, a psychic medium, kept interrupting him mid-conversation to receive messages from the dead.
This stuff is horrible – but what brilliant TV! Pure reality television. In other words: thrilling and horrifying, potentially exploitative, low-brow, but also, maybe, if you squint at it, kind of profound?
This sounds like at least part of what developer Nicole He is trying to capture with The Crush House, a game she calls a “thirst-person shooter” set in a kind of late-90s-slash-present-day Big Brother Malibu Barbie Terrace House, which also features a mystery slide.
He is a former creative technologist at Google, a role she described as “like a programmer, but doing kind of experimental projects – or doing things with experimental new technology basically – often playful projects, making art, even with technology.” She’s previously got an AI model to interview Billie Eilish, and created a True Love Tinder Robot, effectively a big ugly hand that mashes the screen of a phone to swipe left or right based on your “feelings”, like a good old fashioned Love Tester machine for the modern day. “It’s an industry that’s very different from games, mostly because the funding model’s very different,” He said, “but there’s a lot of overlap on a creative level, and from the technical angle.”