The Crush House (Windows)

The Crush House
Developer: Nerial Publisher: Devolver Digital Platform: Windows Released internationally: August 9, 2024 This game has unused playable characters. This game has unused graphics.

This article is a work in progress. ...Well, all the articles here are, in a way. But this one moreso, and the article may contain incomplete information and editor's notes.

To do: There's a bunch of stuff to look into. Nerial uses this weird scene package structure and excluded the frontend debugging stuff but the code for stuff like the console still seems to be present. There's a handful of "sandbox" scene packages that seemed to have been used for testing though it's unclear if they can be loaded. Placeholder and unused strings are kicking about. Deactivated scene objects. Who knows what else?

The Crush House puts you in the shoes of Jae Jimenez Jung as the producer and camera operator of the titular The Crush House, 1999's hottest reality TV show. Surely nothing could go wrong!

Unused Graphics

Early Character Portraits

To do: Would be nice to have comparisons to final designs, but the game doesn't have face-focused portraits in the files and cropping the fullbodies would probably be weird

Present in the game's files are early portraits for all of the cast members. These portraits appear to be cropped from concept art and have varying levels of difference from the final design. Gunther's art seems to be the closest in both style and design to the final game whereas Priscilla's is the most radically different.

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  Alex

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  Ayo

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  Bea

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  Charlie

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  Coco

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  Diya

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  Emile

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  Gunther

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  Joyumi

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  Milo

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  Priscilla

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  Veer

Placeholder Ad Thumbnail

This image was presumably used as a placeholder thumbnail for ads that had yet to have proper thumbnails made.

Unused Character Data

While the characters themselves are not unused, OG Alex, OG Bea, and even Jae herself all have full character definitions despite not being cast members. This includes their own core traits and traits they're attracted to as well as "dealbreaker" traits and whether or not they are regarded as male.

This is largely just a result of the game using a unified system for all of its character actor entities, including these 3 non-castable characters. Even though none of the actual personality data is used, OG Alex and Bea still need character definitions to appear as characters you talk to in their scenes, and Jae needs one because the Jae that shows up during the third-person dialogue sequences and cutscenes still counts as an actor entity.

OG Alex shares his castable counterpart's traits exactly. OG Bea's traits are almost identical to her castable counterpart's but has an attraction for pragmatic characters instead of idealistic ones (which matches Bea's own idealism trait). This slight difference could suggest that OG Bea's definition was copied from an earlier version of the castable Bea's.

Unfortunately, Jae's traits are non-unique and are just an exact duplicate of OG Bea's traits.

Furthmore, it's possible to make them castable via modding which will make them selectable at the start of a season. Having never actually been intended to be used as cast members, they're only partially functional. They do appear and are more or less capable of interacting with each other and normal cast members. All 3 characters are missing most icons so their casting icons, end of day/season splash art and PDA entries will appear as white squares. They all lack any unique dialogue or interactions and so they will be confined strictly to generic ones. Any conversations or scripted sequences that would normally require them to speak a character-specific line will simply cause them to skip their part in the conversation. Certain other things such as alternate outfits will also appear buggy, with additional clothes overlapping onto their base model. They will, however, use any unique animations they have which mainly just means idle animations.

OG Alex and OG Bea

OG Alex and OG Bea, being actual NPCs in normal gameplay and sharing their castable counterparts' IDs, are the most functional. In terms of visuals, OG Alex and Bea do have the required mini-portraits used for relationship indicators and the save screen since they're also used for task icons.

Their names will show up as "Mysterious Man" and "Mysterious Woman" respectively until you learn their names in the game's story, but will still be referred to as "Alex" and "Bea" by other characters regardless. Strangely, they have no names in the PDA.

Besides the minor visual issues and lack of unique lines, OG Alex and Bea will generally function as normal (if boring) cast members.

Jae

The same cannot be said for Jae.

She's by far the buggiest of the three, since she isn't even intended to be an actual NPC and is only ever used as a cutscene actor.

On top of the general bugs that also affect OG Alex and Bea, Jae doesn't seem to have any name assigned in any way that the game can use. This means there'll always be a blank space where her name should be. This also plays havoc with the game's dialogue system which will suffer an error due to a missing null check every time she tries to speak, resulting in her being mute and unable to actually say anything though her gestures still work and conversations between her and others are still mostly functional despite being one-sided.

In addition, she'll be near-constantly looking off in odd directions due to her head staying locked onto whoever was looking at last. Her facial expressions also have a tendency to get stuck in a similar way and in some cases she can even get stuck holding props.

However, Jae's problems extend beyond these minor and somewhat amusing issues. She is in-fact capable of softlocking the entire game in at least 2 different ways.

The most egregious issue is that having Jae in the house as a cast member will cause the game to softlock when you talk to a character at night, making it impossible to progress as the game forces you to talk to characters. This is because cast member Jae hijacks the actor entity usually reserved for these dialogue scenes and ends up being disabled when she goes into her sleeping pod. Since the game is reliant on Jae's actor for the conversation system, a softlock occurs. This does not affect OG Bea or Alex, as their interactions always occur in separate scenes to the main house where their actors are always activated when they should be. The only way around this is to use further modding to re-enable (or prevent the disabling) of Jae's actor entity.

A second softlock can also occasionally occur where she'll end up locking another character into a broken, perpetually silent "conversation". This is a problem since the game won't progress the day if it'd interrupt a character conversation, making this another softlock.