Harvester is a well-made 2D point-and-click adventure that goes for a lot of things. It pokes fun at the USA of the 1950's, with all its apple pie, purity and skeletons in the closet... but the way it does this is by being acutely aware of many a horror cliche, told in the fever dream style of Twin Peaks and Kafka, with a touch of the X-Files. With that many thematical elements it's amazing how coherent the game manages to be. It could have easily been a mish-mash of cool ideas from various devs with no rhyme or reason to it. Yeah, and it's violent in the splatterhouse sort of way as well. Harvester has aged pretty well. The FMV bits aren't very high quality as such, but they're not amateurishly done and the acting is, especially for a game of this era, very good. It's also fine from a technical standpoint, although one might have to adjust Dosbox's CPU cycles in order to bypass a few minor glitches. The puzzles are the game's one weakness, but it feels unfair to put it that way, since there are multiple solutions available in numerous scenarios. Still, it's easy to find yourself stuck, because you failed to find that one small hotspot in a sea of dithered pixels. Or, because you discarded your previous course of action because you thought it didn't work, while you were doing the right thing but in a way the developers hadn't thought. (There's a day-night cycle that affects what actions are available to you; if you haven't picked up the correct items, you can't proceed. This is the biggest issue for many players, I understand.) All in all, it's a fine adventure game with a sinister and humorous atmosphere. If you like the aforementioned TV shows/authors, David Lynch or maybe the Residents, and aren't afraid to check a walkthrough every now and then, go for it!
The game may be a LSL game in name only, but the 3D exploring and minigaming make for a fun enough game. The game's cast of characters is pretty varied, even if heavily reliant on stereotypes, and the voice acting is good. The plot won't win any awards, but it holds everything together. There a lot of different minigames, ranging from Simon Says to Tapper to rhythm games. The controls can be hard to grasp at first, but with some practice most of them become fun instead of a chore. (For example, I really disliked Quarters and Trampoline at first. Quarters was hard to win using the mouse, and Trampoline seemed to ignore some of my keypresses. After a while both became easy and maybe even a bit addictive.) The most annoying thing about LSLMCL is the out-of-place childish humor. A lot of wind gets passed and other bodily functions are in the limelight as well. If the game went for more of a high school drama spoof thing, it would make more sense on the whole. While the toilet humor is there, it's not the only genre the game's going for, luckily... The GOG version is, as the title implies, uncut and uncensored. There's nudity, sex and foul language and if it's done well enough, if that's what you're after. It's not porn, though. From a technical standpoint, the game has aged well. Antialiasing and anisotropic filtering can be forced from the GPU driver (for Nvidia, at least), and the game allows for setting a widescreen resolution in its ini files (namely Larry.ini). It also plays nice with >60Hz monitors. I played it on a 144Hz monitor and everything was smooth. It must be said though that having vertical sync enabled did result in jerky movement on both 60 and 144 hertz modes, so your mileage may vary. Good game, if something of a mixed bag.
