When asking around for games to play for this project, one of the titles that came up often was Harvester. I didn't have any knowledge of the game, so I went to read up on it on Wikipedia (which is never wrong). Wikipedia says it is a 1996 point-and-click adventure: "known for its violent content, cult following, and examination of the relationship between fictional violence and actual violence."
I was intrigued.
So I fired it up, and watched the opening full-motion video to try and get an idea of what was going on. That didn't get me too far. It's a wordless video filled with images that seem post-apocalyptic, mixed with some random gross-out shots, mixed with exterior shots of large buildings.
Ok, so it's a very small town...looks like it's seen better days.
Crop circles? Possible aliens?
Empty classroom, streets with blood? Something weird is going on here.
A giant ominous building right in the center of town... I wonder if this has anything to do with the weirdness going on.
Gah! What the...who the... why???
Then you are just dropped into the game. Your job is to figure everything else out. You do this through the usual point-and-click adventure tropes of clicking on anything that the game says you can click on, and talk to every single character in the game to piece together the story.
This is you... you don't even know your name at the start of the game (you quickly learn it's Steve). But you have no idea how you got here, why you are here, or where here even is.
Your bedroom is pretty nice, anyway.
So, you start the long arduous process of discovering the plot of the game by going around to various rooms and interacting with the people and things in them. The game at least makes it obvious when you are supposed to do something, as the Harvester cursor changes form when it's over something you could look at, changes to gears if you can interact with it, and a hand if you can try and grab it.
I did find the mouse controls to be kind of janky and inaccurate, but don't know if that's just a factor of emulation issues, or if the game actually had poor mouse controls. Early in the game, it doesn't really make a difference (though it might later on).
When you first leave your bedroom, you start to get an idea that something isn't right.
You are definitely a 1990's guy, and this is definitely a 1950's house. Complete with a giant console tv, and bratty young child watching an ultra-violent Western. After talking to him, and getting yelled at by someone purported to be your mother, you go into the kitchen.
Why are the cookies in the trash? Who knows. Just one of the slightly off things. Oh hey look, there's a baby in the crib...
GAH!! A wasp on the forehead, and a tarantula in the mouth... nothing a hard slap in the face from mommy won't solve (and yet, that's what happens in the cutscene).
So, at this point, some 10 minutes in, all you've learned is that your name is Steve... you have a brother and a sister, dad's sick upstairs, and you're getting married in 2 weeks to someone you've never met named Stephanie.
You can venture around town to meet some of the other misfits in Harvest. If you go to Stephanie's house, you meet both of her parents (her mom looks vaguely familiar...) and her dad who has two obsessions, both of which are gross, one is meat...
and if you explore the bathroom on the second floor enough, you learn the other is his daughter.
Gross.
Eventually, you start to get a better picture of what's going on in this town, but the more you learn, the grosser and more unsettling it becomes. Even beyond the gore, and the thinly veiled incest narrative that pops up a couple times, this game also likes to tread on other time worn tropes that balance on the lines of decency.
Let's visit the old neighbor down the street...he loves his car...and thinking about Stephanie
Nice and blunt. It's kind of like the game doesn't trust you to understand innuendo, so one character or another just has to say the quiet parts out loud and as crassly as possible. This sort of blunt reference is made frequently. I think they mean it to be shocking, but comes off as childish.
So, let's go to the tv station, where the hyper-violent Western is made.
Yes, you are reading that screen correctly.
Wow, just wow.
Oh, I haven't mentioned the Fire Department yet. The fire department where the firetruck is pink, and every fire fighter talks with a grossly exaggerated lisp, and the firemen spend all day drawing half-naked men.
I finally figured out the first puzzle that needed to be solved was that you had to get an application for "The Lodge" (the giant building in the middle of the town). You got the application at the Post Office, but the Postmaster wouldn't just give it to you... you have some other things to do first.
This is pretty much as far as I got. I don't know for sure how much I played, but it was 3-4 hours spread out over 4-5 sessions. I had to restart a couple times because the first run I didn't understand anything that was going on, and the second time I forgot to save. Saving, by the way, can only be done at a location, and not from the city map...which would have been useful to know.
This is just not the kind of experience I want in a game. It's bleak, it's depressing, and it's unrelentingly gross on several levels. Not to mention the acting is unbelievably bad and the writing may be worse.
At this point, I'm going to make a couple references towards the end of the game (which I've watched videos of, as I didn't play it that far) , so if you don't want to read anything about it, I encourage you to stop reading here. Thanks for coming this far. If you want to try Harvester out for yourself, it's available on most platforms, including eXoDOS, where I played it.
So, the game is supposed to be a meta-commentary about the difference between real and virtual violence. Your character Steve, is from the mid-90's and is taking part in an experiment in virtual reality. At the end he has the choice to either go through with the marriage to Stephanie, in which case they will both die in real life as the overseers to the project will deem him a failure, and terminate both of them, or Kill Stephanie which kills her in real life, but returns him to the real world where he will live out his life, but as a violent murderer.
If you've ever seen the movie Funny Games, it's kind of like that. In that the characters in movie break the 4th wall, and chastise you, the viewer, for watching a violent movie about a family being held hostage and murdered for entertainment.
When it came out, Harvester was banned in Germany. In the US, it received some criticism from parent groups. In a notable case, in December of 1996, a family psychologist named Dr. David Walsh put out a list of excessively violent games. Harvester was not on the list. The lead programmer, Lee Jacobsen demanded Walsh put the game on the list. His cheap publicity stunt failed, as did Harvester in general.
I did not enjoy my time with Harvester. That's one reason it took so long to get to this post. I just couldn't bring myself to come back to it. So, I eventually just decided to talk about what I did play...which wasn't much, but it was weird. So, there's that... I guess.
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