Customer Reviews

Harvester

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Harvester is one of those games that will always hold a special place in my dark little heart. This is the kind of game a horror fan would love to play but never expect to find - it's gory, it's sick, it's twisted, it's politically incorrect - i.e., it's all kinds of great. It's easily the darkest, weirdest game I've ever come across. This thing goes back all the way to 1996, but I think it still holds up well. I recently played it again for the first time in years and enjoyed the heck out of it. It was one of the first games I ever played featuring full-motion video, its point-and-click interface worked well, and you even had the ability to type in a very limited number of your own queries. Thanks to a two-year delay in its initial release, it wasn't cutting-edge in 1996, but it certainly wasn't old hat, either.

You're Steve Mason, a seemingly normal kid who wakes up one morning with complete amnesia to find yourself immersed in a 1950s suburban nightmare. Your Mom won't stop baking cookies and immediately tossing them in the trash, your kid brother is glued to the TV watching a western featuring surprisingly realistic violence, and your father is locked in the bedroom for unknown reasons. You're also engaged to the girl next door, which turns out to be quite a good thing once you get a peek at her through a peephole in the bathroom of her parents' home. Like you, she has no idea what she is doing in this strange new place, but her pre-wedding confinement to her bedroom means you'll have to explore the town and figure things out on your own. The town of Harvester holds only 51 people (and that number tends to decrease as you go along), but every last one of them is exceedingly weird. And they won't shut up about "the Lodge" and your need to become a member. It's true, though, because it soon becomes obvious that the only answers are to be found behind the doors of the mysterious Order of the Harvest Moon.

Just take a gander at some of the townspeople you'll have to interact with: a madman with no legs who's more than ready to unleash the town's nuclear bombs on the Commies, a schoolteacher who routinely enforces discipline with a baseball bat and the principal who loves her (every afternoon in the janitor's closet), a woman whose house is basically a giant wasps' nest, truly flaming gay firemen, a closet arsonist, and a perverted deputy who wants nothing more out of life than a girlie magazine and a little time to himself. I just couldn't believe some of the characters populating this little world. And that's just a small taste of what awaits you in Harvester.

Don't' worry - I'm not forgetting the gore factor. From the disgusting meat packing plant Steve's father owns to the violent goings-on inside the dark Lodge, this game has more than its share of gruesome images (e.g., a mother being eaten by her small children). You can elect to turn the gore off, but why on earth would you want to do that? It's kill or be killed in the latter stages of the game, and I say let the blood fly wherever it may. Speaking of those later stages, I must say I even liked the game's twist of an ending, which puts a new perspective on all of the disturbing things you've seen and done in order to get there.

This is a pretty old game now, so you'll need a DOS emulator if you want to play it on a PC with post-Windows 98 operating systems (I use DOSBox, myself). It's worth the effort if you like your games dark and bloody. The most impressive thing about the game is the way it wholly immerses you in the surreal town of Harvester from the very start. Obviously, all the Chicken Littles who panic at the sight of a drop of blood in a completely imaginary setting will no doubt be offended by everything about this game (it was banned completely in Germany, dropped by distributors in Australia, and released without some of its best content in Great Britain), but I for one get a huge kick out of playing it.