Harvester

Some folks prefer the family friendly LucasArts Adventures (yuck!), I'd have to go with HARVESTER and its satirical Twin Peaks-like setting coupled with some of the good old Ultra Violence. Live-action actors and cinematic footage was used for the FMV cutscenes, making the ultra-gory scenes even more brutal. The humor is very 90s and NOT politically correct which will send your Gen Z liberal into a temper tantrum - they sure don't make'em like this anymore. I'm honestly surprised by the ESRB M Rating with all the suggested nastiness with minors, an AO18+ rating would have been more appropriate. HARVESTER excels in atmosphere and story with a cast of hilarious characters that are unforgettable. Otherwise it's your typical Point & Click adventure (nor really my genre) of walking around, talking to NPCs and solving "puzzles" by picking up and using or combining items which you carry around in your inventory. For fans of Twin Peaks-like stories combined with some gory murders this is a must-own. Seriously, forget LucasArts, THIS is the best Point & Click Adventure ever made!

Whenever I see people talking about Harvester, there are two big camps: People who played it, and people who watched it. The former tend to remember its clunky controls, terrible combat, nonsensical puzzles, and ridiculous item-hoarding. The latter tend to just remember the game for its quirky and vulgar subject matter. Harvester, as a game, is terrible. It's nearly unplayable. You have to explore a large town, stockpile ridiculous amounts of inventory, solve nonsensical puzzles, and sit through some pretty heinous voice acting for information. The combat is the worst of it, with unresponsive controls and awful hit detection. There's not much of a game here. The most appealing part of Harvester is technically the least-appealing part of the game. Harvester is violent and crazy, and pretty stupid. Throughout the game, you're subjected to gory cutscenes, awkward sexual content, and and skin-crawlingly uncomfortable characters and situations. It's played as kind of a tongue-in-cheek sort of way about 95% of the way through the game. Inexplicably, the game shifts tones right at the end as it think it has some deep subject matter and wants to teach you something. It's heavy-handed and hypocritical, and it's not going to change anyone's mind. Most people who buy and enjoy Harvester will get the most enjoyment out of the subject matter. As is, if you feel like you have to buy it, have a strategy guide handy. Or better yet, just watch a playthrough of it online.

I really wanted to like this game, I tried slogging through it on two separate occasions. The way the mystery of the town pulls you in is really well thought out, I love all of Harvest's little eccentricities, and the commentary on the normalization of violence in the media is definitely interesting (especially given the time period in which this game came out, where just two years prior there was a big controversy over violence in video games ala Mortal Kombat and Doom), but ultimately Harvester is an interesting concept that just wasn't executed very well. The whole live actors against a computer-generated background look feels extremely outdated and hasn't aged well at all, the controls are clunky (yes, even for a 90's adventure game), and a lot of the time it feels like they're being gross or obscene just for the sake of it instead of trying to make a point.

This would be 3.5/5 stars from me, if I had more control over the rating system. The obvious stuff is that, as a controversial horror game, you'll find tons of gore and some truly disturbing scenes. The good news is that, in spite of what some conservative critics said back at the time of the game's release (sometimes without having even touched the game), Harvester actually has some interesting message(s) to convey, the main point being the examination of the controversy about whether violence in media creates, or is created by, violence in society. Hence, there's quite a bit of thought-provoking material; at the same time, there's a lot of silliness here, but most of the time it seems to be done on purpose, and the dark humour works. Now, the game does have its share of problems: the combat is clunky, occasionally the gore seems cheap and some of the silliness pulls you out of the game's world. In fact, one of the main problems would be the lack of fear experienced while playing the game (a problem for any work of horror fiction): there was really only just about one moment that made me have a fright, although there were several other instances that successfully managed to make me cringe. The relative freedom the player enjoys when exploring Harvest is a good thing, which can lead to some interesting experimentation (a plus on the gameplay side), but it also shows its limits very quickly, breaking immersion (as an example *SPOILER* you can kill the barber during the day, then steal the barber's pole and you'll be arrested for theft because the "barber" apparently calls the police... WTF, and the game will only register the theft, not the murder, although after your arrest you can still go back to the barber shop and see the dead body - along with the pole back in its place!). If anything, this is certainly the strangest game I've ever played. Not great by any means, but it is a good video game which, importantly, manages to be memorable in spite of its issues.

Harvester has an interesting premise, and while the game is excessively violent, there is some interesting commentary on violence in entertainment. Unfortunately, the puzzles are mostly annoying pixel hunts and controlling the character in combat barely fulfills the definition of control. So know what you are getting into. The game does contain tons of bizzarre characters and events and some gloriously bad FMV acting, so there is that to enjoy.