Crush Crush

Today we’re talking about Cookie Clicker, sort of. Well, we’re looking at Crush Crush, which is one of Nutaku’s more original takes on the dating sim genre, with a ton of smut payoff for your gameplay. Except, as you may or may not know, Nutaku tends to take one kind of gameplay from other games, usually non-pornographic ones, and mix it with some titties. It’s a great formula. It’s kind of like having a very demanding girlfriend who has you do random chores in exchange for sex. Laundry and sex are not related, but you’re more likely to enjoy one if you know it leads to the other.

Most of their other games combine some form of RPG gameplay with the dating harem vibe of gathering and training chicks. They also have a lot of puzzle games on the side. You get the harem here, probably more directly than you do in other games – you start off with a small harem. But, the gameplay that leads to them actually warming up to you and, well, taking your cock up their ass, is… well, it’s Cookie Clicker. For those of you in the audience who have never played Cookie Clicker, you’re about to get a double feature review, because these two games are exactly the fucking same.

A Controversial Past

Cookie Clicker was the second so-called incremental game ever made. It was coded in a single day and grew like wildfire in a matter of hours. I’ll tell you more about the features when I flip over to what makes Crush Crush a fun experience, but first, I have to tell you about the first-ever incremental game, Cow Clicker.

Cow Clicker was made as a sort of social experiment video game that served to show people how standard social media games abuse their time and money. The game was supposed to be a parody, showing people that these types of games have no real artistic value. They’re just made to waste your time by abusing your natural tendencies towards addiction and positive reinforcement.

Naturally, no-one listened or cared, as a few years later, Cookie Clicker came out, and everyone loved it. Ever since then, we’ve gotten literal hundreds of incremental games, and they’ve all been super successful, relative to the size of their launch. It would seem that incremental games are so irresistible that they can’t fail. I know they were technically invented to showcase the worst that gaming has to offer, but I’m not sold on that idea, and I’ll show you why.

A Slow but Fair Start

I’m gonna stop comparing Crush Crush to Cookie Clicker now and just tell you about the gameplay, because all the elements of one can be found in the other, and there’s no point in repeating that.

So, you start the game, and you have a harem full of girls. In true Nutaku fashion, there are visual novel scenes to introduce you to some of the characters and give you a tiny bit of story, even though in reality, there is no relevant story, it’s all about the action. I like that, to be honest.

Now, in other Nutaku games, right after the tutorial, you’re dropped into some basic gameplay, without being allowed to see what comes after. You have to earn the right to scale up to the more serious gameplay. You sort of get that here as well, but it feels like it’s your fault. Allow me to explain. When you start off the game for the first time, you have very little money, and you work at a fast-food joint as a meat manager of all things. You are free to try to perform expensive actions, but you can’t afford the money. You might want to purchase some items or get some hobbies, but you don’t have the time. The game isn’t punishing you for being new; instead, it’s your fault for not being rich. I prefer this approach to the gameplay, because it motivates me to become better and more successful.

A Passive Second Life

So, how do you become better at money, hobbies, and banging chicks? You do more with your time. Ah, but time doesn’t come for free. You have to unlock time slots in order to populate them with shit to do. You have a certain amount of time slots. Let’s say that you have six hours every day. You can choose to work in the fast-food industry, but that takes around 4 hours out of your day. You can also go dancing and partying, as a hobby, but those take 3 hours each. That means it’s up to you to choose which ones you’re going to be doing. Once you’ve made your choice, your character will perform those actions all the time. And I mean, all the time. You don’t have to play the game. These actions will be performed automatically.

What’s the point? Well, money nets you gifts for the girls, and it also lets you purchase important items. Hobbies, on the other hand, give you diamonds, an in-game currency that’s used to unlock further time slots in your day, as well as upgrades to existing jobs. So, it’s sort of a two-pronged system. On the one hand, you make money; on the other, you earn diamonds. Diamonds mean more money; more money means more diamonds. It’s simple enough.

The most important part to keep in mind is that this is all passive. Yes, you do have to log in to purchase items and change up your routine, but the actual actions themselves are performed by your character passively. As for the stuff you have to do yourself, well, there’s plenty of it, but it’s kind of tricky.

Coming Back for More

This is the optimal game to keep coming back to occasionally, because the brunt of the work is done while you’re away, but the important decisions are yours to make. It’s kind of like being the CEO of a large company run by people who can generally turn a profit. Still, they need you to come in once in a while and improve things by waving your magic wand at their quarterly projections.

In the case of this game, you come back in order to change your job with a better job, provided your character’s stats are up to par. You also can use the aforementioned diamonds to improve the job you already have.

And of course, there’s the most important part, the girls. This is roughly the part that’s going to drive you a little crazy, because the girls are neither part of the passive play or the active play, they’re somewhere in between. I know it’s confusing, but bear with me.

Women are Complicated as Fuck

At the start of the game, you’re going to have no money and embarrassing stats, so interacting with any of the three girls you have available is going to be a waste of time. You can’t buy them gifts, so the best you can hope for is just… saying sorry, over and over again. That’s not going to get you in their pants.

So, let’s say you set up your job at the fast-food joint and dancing as a hobby, then you leave the game overnight. You should have a few hundred thousand dollars the next day, yay. You can use that money to play around with all the girls for a little while and get them to stop hating you. But, good luck trying to actually bang one of them on day one. You’d have to play for hours to get to that point, and then, naturally, you’d run out of money, and you’d have to wait another day.

This is why I said that the chicks are neither passive nor active. On the one hand, you have to play the game yourself in order to romance them. On the other hand, the game pushes you away the second you lose money. So, you’re constantly being dicked around.

Is It Worth It?

I’d rather have a passive clicker game that’s honest about its gameplay than one that says is an RPG, but actually isn’t. Crush Crush is very honest, and I like that. As I said, I enjoy incremental games a lot, even when they don’t come with smut, so this game is nothing but a bonus for me.

As for the smut itself, it’s not as hot as some other Nutaku titles I’ve tried, but it’s still top-notch shit, because this company does not fuck around.

The main reason I love this game, probably more than any other Nutaku title, is because it’s genuinely built around the idea of being played regularly, and it rewards you for that quite nicely. It’s actually satisfying to switch up jobs and get diamonds and what not. All the smut and the girls, that’s nothing less than a huge bonus.