The Crush House review: sassiety of the spectacle

Maniac McMansion

Image credit:Devolver / Rock Paper Shotgun

• Developer: Nerial
• Publisher: Devolver Digital
• Release: August 9th 2024
• On: Windows
• From: Steam
• Price: $16.99/£14.99/€16.99
• Reviewed on: Intel Core-i7 12700F, 16GB RAM, Nvidia RTX 3060, Windows 11

When I zoom the camera on Alex’s momentarily untensed face while he’s dozing by the pool, it’s not because I’m a creep. When I pursue Ayo and Dija around the garden, keeping their feet and butts in shot as they belittle each other, it’s not because I’m a busybody and a lech. And when I pan to the lighthouse piercing the sunset beyond the security spikes it’s not out of any feeling of wonder, or even curiosity about possible escape routes. Please understand: I do not see these people, these objects at all, just the boneless, faceless traces they leave upon my own servitude to the lens.

In the past I’ve described The Crush House as a parody of reality TV , but that’s not how I feel about the game I’ve reviewed. The description fits the premise, of course: in this sunny first-person hybrid of management game, roguelike and immersive sim, you are the sole camerawoman for a 90s reality TV show that takes place on an island off the coast of Malibu. Seasons of the show last a week, each beginning with the selection of a four-person cast from a pool of 12 characters. The characters cover a range of obnoxious archetypes, from rosy-cheeked prudes to swaggering gym rats, all of whom look like slightly spaghettified versions of the Sims.

Every day, you seize your camera, set forth from your stagnant basement lodgings, and film everybody roaming the mansion above while they play-act at being a household. What you film is determined by a randomised collection of viewer demographics spanning many ages, genders, backgrounds and peccadilloes. Each audience group has a HUD icon that must be filled up by shooting footage that scratches their itches. There’s also a bubbling chat feed that offers more specific hints about audience preferences, such as people whinging about the zoom level. When not capturing footage, you’ll screen adverts - cheekily contributed by other indie game developers, such as Bennett Foddy and Bay 12 - to earn the means to buy new props for the house, again with particular audiences in mind.

Fail to sate the required number of demographics each episode, and on Normal difficulty, the show will be cancelled, forcing you to start the day over. Make it all the way to Saturday, and you’ll join the cast for a ride on the Success Slide, a hoop of gaudy, plastic intestine grafted to the Crush House’s top floor. Success, however, simply means beginning afresh: you’ll reappear inside the starting elevator, replay the (brief) tutorial dialogue with your assistant producer over walkie-talkie, and choose another cast for the next season. The challenge increases with each season: there are fresh demographics to figure out, and more of them to satisfy per episode. And so, of course, does your suspicion about the real nature of the show, which teems with sinister set dressing: the snot-green Crush Juice everybody can’t stop drinking, the swivel-eyed Korby mascots, the satellite dish on the hill above the mansion.

There are callbacks to many reality TV shows in The Crush House, more than I can pin down. The mansion soundtrack of watery nu-metal and R&B is pure MTV (you can change the muzack to appease certain audiences). The characters hold up a mirror to everybody from Nasty Nick to the Kardashians. But I’m not sure this game is about nostalgia for reality TV, in practice. It’s about Content, in the present-day, always-online sense of the term - delicious, amorphous, disembodied content. Content, coursing through the pipes of the Success Slide. Content, dripping with an audible glug-glug into the audience icons on your feed.

Image credit:Devolver / Rock Paper Shotgun

Filming Content isn’t the same as filming people. Reality TV needs stars, powerful egos with that boutique blend of photogenic and sympathetic and unbearable. The Content industry doesn’t need stars, though it may sporadically reward them. It needs profitable configurations of text, imagery and sound, with “profitable” defined by “audiences” that are themselves arbitrary homunculi of marketing data. There is room for the figure and anatomy of the human being only inasmuch as it can be stretched and smeared to fit whatever datapoints are in vogue.

This comes across, beautifully and unpleasantly, in how the game chaperones your camerawork and slowly bleaches away all question of technique. You might expect to earn the biggest rewards from clean, soap opera-style footage of the bodies and faces of housemates in conversation. And that’s sort of how it works initially. The earlier audience demographics you unlock are focused on the human components of the scene: they want to see blossoming tenderness, squabbles, flirting, snogging, the good stuff. There’s more leisure at this stage to practise your craft, encouraged but not compelled by the gentle goading of your daily objectives.

The act of finding creative angles to shoot from is akin to finding a good sniping spot or obscure route in Dishonored , and the game is surprisingly parkour-friendly, with a running jump and (fiddly) auto-ledge grab. The Crush House itself is compact and relentlessly transparent, made up of plate glass and doorless alcoves - a panopticon with a conversation pit. You’ll memorise the layout in no time. But the movement of the characters, the buying of props, and the scrambling of audience demographics perform small acts of reinvention from episode to episode. There’s a wealth of authentically bitchy writing in the game, with lines for every combination of cast members, and part of the job is obviously matching up people who are likely to have chemistry of one kind or another.

It’s an inglorious, sordid living. Still, there’s an art to it. I take serious pride in a few of my scenes from the early game, like the full cast shot I filmed while standing on the kitchen chandelier. But as you unlock more audiences, the mathematics of Content overtake the crafting of drama. Some of the viewerships make no sense at all. The plumbing enthusiasts want to look at the house’s single luxurious toilet all day (so do the people with motion sickness and the uber-rich kids, for different reasons). The Pharologists are endlessly curious about the lighthouse. The Foodies hanker for imagery of posh kitchenware and performative pot-stirring. And while the Voyeurs are… intrigued by the cast, they would often prefer you film each housemate on their own and at a distance, without the target’s awareness.

Image credit:Devolver / Rock Paper Shotgun

Slop those last four demands together, and the moneyshot becomes a crouched perspective from behind the kitchen sink, with a bowl of fruit half-obscuring your view of somebody having a smoke by the pool - and the lighthouse juuuust visible through the conservatory on the left. Sometimes, The Crush House motivates you to take footage of nothing at all: glimpses of failing shadows through gauzy folds of peach-foam glass, which somehow trigger a geyser of thirst icons and a satisfaction multiplier represented as ludicrous, Naruto-style acceleration lines.

You might call this a failure of the game’s simulation of reality TV. While I can’t quite speak to the developer’s intentions, I think it’s actually a very successful representation of how our networked entertainment sphere has slyly squeezed out both human agency and increasingly, human spectatorship. Again, it feels more like a commentary on Content, on Thinking With Data and in particular, on generative AI.

Rather than just lampooning the preening idiots who find their way onto reality TV shows, the game takes aim at how today’s digital economy hoards and regurgitates information based on its own, undead modelling of curiosity and desire. It encourages you to behave not like a gossip or a peeping Tom but a sexless and soulless CAPTCHA drone, orienting itself to isolate fixtures that fit the target metrics. When I film people on the loo, or while they’re kissing, or while they’re visibly distressed, it’s not because I’m a paparazzo aiming to titillate or scandalise or force some empathy. I don’t see the “talent” at all, just taggable hues or attitudes that need to be converted into numbers.

I’m linking this to the present-day digital content economy, but the themes above took shape in the 1960s. Guy Debord writes about something similar in The Society Of The Spectacle , describing how “the specialization of images of the world has culminated in a world of autonomized images where even the deceivers are deceived” - a capitalist endgame in which everybody’s alienation from everybody else is total, and the system of production and representation operates without instruction or interruption, bestowing agency on spectacular commodities rather than the gloomy consumer-labourers doomed to traipse back and forth between workplace and marketplace. The Crush House is Debord’s “vicious circle of isolation” in miniature. It is a place of zero privacy and yet, absolute loneliness: everybody present is faking it, and the economic systems that structure this syrupy pocket of spacetime do not regard the participants as people.

Having taught you to behave like a drone, The Crush House turns the screws. It’s a surprisingly difficult experience, with a constipated mid-game. You can’t see which audience types will surface during a season, and certain combinations of cast and viewing demographic are nigh-incompatible. Hard to do much for a viewership that wants to ogle the lads when you have an all-girl season, for example.

Image credit:Devolver / Rock Paper Shotgun

The game throws you a lifeline by arranging for thirst points from sated demographics to spill over into those you’re still wooing: unconvinced viewers get swept along by the excitement of the rest, basically. The house props also compensate for the trickier cast/audience match-ups: if you need to engineer a Wholesome Moment, buying a kitsch dog statue might get warring parties chatting about their pets. But props are pricey, even once you learn to optimise the ads and skip to commercials that suit the viewers of the day. I only ever earned enough to buy a couple of cheap items or a single prestige item per season. By season five, with six or more audience demographics to nail every episode, I was striking out several times a season. I grew to despise the production assistant, who makes you take the walk of shame to the underground Failure Slide every time - there are no instant restarts in The Crush House, which feels entirely deliberate.

Image credit:Devolver / Rock Paper Shotgun

And then there’s what happens between episodes. Night is when you get to rove the mansion at your leisure, with no viewers to appease, buying props for the next episode. In the process, you might stumble into a cast member with an illicit request about how you portray them on-air. The Labrador-like Alex is a former high school loner who’d like you to show him making a friend or two. Bulging pornstar Emile wants you to provoke his fans by filming him kissing somebody while hiding the other person’s identity.

These favours aren’t exactly Hero’s Quests, and fulfilling them can be maddening given all the other pressures. There’s one that requires you to avoid filming butts for a whole episode, which I attempted several times only for a rogue buttock to sneak its way into the screen corner at the last second. The game gives you the option of turning requests down, even scornfully. But helping other people is helpful for you. Amongst other things, it triggers additional encounters, unlocking the way to other areas deep beneath The Crush House, which harbour the hope of escape.

I’m going to break it off here - partly because after 10 hours, I’m still plumbing those depths, and partly because I’m not sure any plot catharsis can exorcise the demons this game conjures. It feels perversely appropriate to leave The Crush House unfinished: we may be able to escape from The Crush House, but I’m not sure we can escape from the idea of The Crush House, not while there is Content to generate.

Inevitably, reviewing the game has made me think about my own job in content creation, aka video game journalism - how the mechanics of my trade teach me to treat readers as aggregates of preferences and compulsions, and the importance of repeatedly carving out some headspace for sympathy and community. I’m not sure The Crush House is enjoyable, beyond the opening thrill of wielding the lens and toying with the systems, but it is enlightening. It is a triumphant performance of dystopia, one that concentrates the understanding rather than merely wallowing in the shit. It takes enormous insight to make something this ugly.

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All 75 Arc Raiders Blueprints and where to get them

These areas have the highest chance of giving you Blueprints

Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Embark Studios

Looking for more Arc Raiders Blueprints? It’s a special day when you find a Blueprint, as they’re among the most valuable items in Arc Raiders. If you find a Blueprint that you haven’t already found, then you must make sure you hold onto it at all costs, because Blueprints are the key to one of the most important and powerful systems of meta-progression in the game.

This guide aims to be the very best guide on Blueprints you can find, starting with a primer on what exactly they are and how they work in Arc Raiders, before delving into exactly where to get Blueprints and the very best farming spots for you to take in your search.

We’ll also go over how to get Blueprints from other unlikely activities, such as destroying Surveyors and completing specific quests. And you’ll also find the full list of all 75 Blueprints in Arc Raiders on this page (including the newest Blueprints added with the Cold Snap update , such as the Deadline Blueprint and Firework Box Blueprint), giving you all the information you need to expand your own crafting repertoire.

In this guide:

• What are Blueprints in Arc Raiders?
• Full Blueprint list: All crafting recipes
• Where to find Blueprints in Arc Raiders Blueprints obtained from quests Blueprints obtained from Trials Best Blueprint farming locations

What are Blueprints in Arc Raiders?

Blueprints in Arc Raiders are special items which, if you manage to extract with them, you can expend to permanently unlock a new crafting recipe in your Workshop. If you manage to extract from a raid with an Anvil Blueprint, for example, you can unlock the ability to craft your very own Anvil Pistol, as many times as you like (as long as you have the crafting materials).

To use a Blueprint, simply open your Inventory while in the lobby, then right-click on the Blueprint and click “Learn And Consume” . This will permanently unlock the recipe for that item in your Workshop. As of the Stella Montis update, there are allegedly 75 different Blueprints to unlock - although only 68 are confirmed to be in the game so far. You can see all the Blueprints you’ve found and unlocked by going to the Workshop menu, and hitting “R” to bring up the Blueprint screen.

It’s possible to find duplicates of past Blueprints you’ve already unlocked. If you find these, then you can either sell them, or - if you like to play with friends - you can take it into a match and gift it to your friend so they can unlock that recipe for themselves. Another option is to keep hold of them until the time comes to donate them to the Expedition.

Full Blueprint list: All crafting recipes

Below is the full list of all the Blueprints that are currently available to find in Arc Raiders, and the crafting recipe required for each item:

Note: The missing Blueprints in this list likely have not actually been added to the game at the time of writing, because none of the playerbase has managed to find any of them. As they are added to the game, I will update this page with the most relevant information so you know exactly how to get all 75 Arc Raiders Blueprints.

Where to find Blueprints in Arc Raiders

Below is a list of all containers, modifiers, and events which maximise your chances of finding Blueprints:

• Certain quests reward you with specific Blueprints .
• Completing Trials has a high chance of offering Blueprints as rewards.
• Surveyors have a decent chance of dropping Blueprints on death.
• High loot value areas tend to have a greater chance of spawning Blueprints.
• Night Raids and Storms may increase rare Blueprint spawn chances in containers.
• Containers with higher numbers of items may have a higher tendency to spawn Blueprints. As a result, Blue Gate (which has many “large” containers containing multiple items) may give you a higher chance of spawning Blueprints.
• Raider containers (Raider Caches, Weapon Boxes, Medical Bags, Grenade Tubes) have increased Blueprint drop rates. As a result, the Uncovered Caches event gives you a high chance of finding Blueprints.
• Security Lockers have a higher than average chance of containing Blueprints.
• Certain Blueprints only seem to spawn under specific circumstances: Tempest Blueprint only spawns during Night Raid events. Vulcano Blueprint only spawns during Hidden Bunker events. Jupiter and Equaliser Blueprints only spawn during Harvester events.

Raider Caches, Weapon Boxes, and other raider-oriented container types have a good chance of offering Blueprints. |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Embark Studios

Blueprints have a very low chance of spawning in any container in Arc Raiders, around 1-2% on average. However, there is a higher chance of finding Blueprints in particular container types. Specifically, you can find more Blueprints in Raider containers and security lockers.

Beyond this, if you’re looking for Blueprints you should focus on regions of the map which are marked as having particularly high-value loot. Areas such as the Control Tower in Dam Battlegrounds, the Arrival and Departure Buildings in Spaceport, and Pilgrim’s Peak in Blue Gate all have a better-than-average chance of spawning Blueprints somewhere amongst all their containers. Night Raids and Electromagnetic Storm events also increase the drop chances of certain Blueprints .

In addition to these containers, you can often loot Blueprints from destroyed Surveyors - the largest of the rolling ball ARC. Surveyors are more commonly found on the later maps - Spaceport and Blue Gate - and if one spawns in your match, you’ll likely see it by the blue laser beam that it casts into the sky while “surveying”.

Surveyors are quite well-armoured and will very speedily run away from you once it notices you, but if you can take one down then make sure you loot all its parts for a chance of obtaining certain unusual Blueprints.

Blueprints obtained from quests

One way in which you can get Blueprints is by completing certain quests for the vendors in Speranza. Some quests will reward you with a specific item Blueprint upon completion, so as long as you work through all the quests in Arc Raiders, you are guaranteed those Blueprints.

Here is the full list of all Blueprints you can get from quest rewards:

• Trigger Nade Blueprint: Rewarded after completing “Sparks Fly”.
• Lure Grenade Blueprint: Rewarded after completing “Greasing Her Palms”.
• Burletta Blueprint: Rewarded after completing “Industrial Espionage”.
• Hullcracker Blueprint (and Launcher Ammo Blueprint): Rewarded after completing “The Major’s Footlocker”.

Alas, that’s only 4 Blueprints out of a total of 75 to unlock, so for the vast majority you will need to find them yourself during a raid. If you’re intent on farming Blueprints, then it’s best to equip yourself with cheap gear in case you lose it, but don’t use a free loadout because then you won’t get a safe pocket to stash any new Blueprint you find. No pain in Arc Raiders is sharper than failing to extract with a new Blueprint you’ve been after for a dozen hours already.

One of the best ways to get Blueprints is by hitting three stars on all five Trials every week. |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Embark Studios

Blueprints obtained from Trials

One of the very best ways to get Blueprints is as rewards for completing Trials in Arc Raiders. Trials are unlocked from Level 15 onwards, and allow you to earn rewards by focusing on certain tasks over the course of several raids. For example, one Trial might task you with dealing damage to Hornets, while another might challenge you to loot Supply Drops.

Trials refresh on a weekly basis, with a new week bringing five new Trials. Each Trial can offer up to three rewards after passing certain score milestones, and it’s possible to receive very high level loot from these reward crates - including Blueprints. So if you want to unlock as many Blueprints as possible, you should make a point of completing as many Trials as possible each week.

Best Blueprint farming locations

The very best way to get Blueprints is to frequent specific areas of the maps which combine high-tier loot pools with the right types of containers to search. Here are my recommendations for where to find Blueprints on every map, so you can always keep the search going for new crafting recipes to unlock.

Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Embark Studios

Dam Battlegrounds

The best places to farm Blueprints on Dam Battlegrounds are the Control Tower, Power Generation Complex, Ruby Residence, and Pale Apartments . The first two regions, despite only being marked on the map as mid-tier loot, contain a phenomenal number of containers to loot. The Control Tower can also contain a couple of high-tier Security Lockers - though of course, you’ll need to have unlocked the Security Breach skill at the end of the Survival tree.

There’s also a lot of reporting amongst the playerbase that the Residential areas in the top-left of the map - Pale Apartments and Ruby Residence - give you a comparatively strong chance of finding Blueprints. Considering their size, there’s a high density of containers to loot in both locations, and they also have the benefit of being fairly out of the way. So you’re more likely to have all the containers to yourself.

Buried City

The best Blueprint farming locations on Buried City are the Santa Maria Houses, Grandioso Apartments, Town Hall, and the various buildings of the New District . Grandioso Apartments has a lower number of containers than the rest, but a high chance of spawning weapon cases - which have good Blueprint drop rates. The others are high-tier loot areas, with plenty of lootable containers - including Security Lockers.

Spaceport

The best places to find Blueprints on Spaceport are the Arrival and Departure Buildings, as well as Control Tower A6 and the Launch Towers . All these areas are labelled as high-value loot regions, and many of them are also very handily connected to one another by the Spaceport wall, which you can use to quickly run from one area to the next. At the tops of most of these buildings you’ll find at least one Security Locker, so this is an excellent farming route for players looking to find Blueprints.

The downside to looting Blueprints on Spaceport is that all these areas are hotly contested, particularly in Duos and Squads. You’ll need to be very focused and fast in order to complete the full farming route.

Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Embark Studios

Blue Gate

Blue Gate tends to have a good chance of dropping Blueprints, potentially because it generally has a high number of containers which can hold lots of items; so there’s a higher chance of a Blueprint spawning in each container. In my experience, the best Blueprint farming spots on Blue Gate are Pilgrim’s Peak, Raider’s Refuge, the Ancient Fort, and the Underground Complex beneath the Warehouse .

All of these areas contain a wealth of containers to loot. Raider’s Refuge has less to loot, but the majority of the containers in and around the Refuge are raider containers, which have a high chance of containing Blueprints - particularly during major events.

Stella Montis

On the whole, Stella Montis seems to have a very low drop rate for Blueprints (though a high chance of dropping other high-tier loot). If you do want to try farming Blueprints on this map, the best places to find Blueprints in Stella Montis are Medical Research, Assembly Workshop, and the Business Center . These areas have the highest density of containers to loot on the map.

In addition to this, the Western Tunnel has a few different Security Lockers to loot, so while there’s very little to loot elsewhere in this area of the map, it’s worth hitting those Security Lockers if you spawn there at the start of a match.

That wraps up this primer on how to get all the Blueprints in Arc Raiders as quickly as possible. With the Expedition system constantly resetting a large number of players’ Blueprints, it’s more important than ever to have the most up-to-date information on where to find all these Blueprints.

While you’re here, be sure to check out our Arc Raiders best guns tier list , as well as our primers on the best skills to unlock and all the different Field Depot locations on every map.

ARC Raiders

PS5 , Xbox Series X/S , PC

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