Harvester looks like it was deliberately crafted after Senator Liebermann's 1991 hearings about violence in video games. It is intensely bloody, and on the surface, utterly depraved. It was, by the time it was finally released in 1996, totally late to the party. While it may have been shocking had it been released in 1994 as planned, it was beaten to the market by other horror adventure games like Sierra's Phantasmagoria and Cyberdreams' Dark Seed II. However, while both of those titles tried to play it seriously, Harvester is a much weirder, off-the-wall experience, one which revels in its absurdity.

NAME wakes up one day with no recollection of who he is, but finds himself in the middle of 1950s surburban America. His kid brother is watching cowboys and indians on their black and white TV set, while his mother is dressed like June Cleaver and perpetually stays in the kitchen baking cookies. Expressions like "shucks!" and "gee willickers!" are still spoken unironically. Steve has no idea who any of these people are, and everyone believes he's simply faking his amnesia. You were always a kidder, they repeatedly tell you.

This is not a time travel story, though, as this version of 1953 is unsettlingly twisted. The town of Harvest is filled with bizarre characters and unsettling circumstances. There's an influx of hobos vagrants, whom the town seems to welcome, but they all seem to disappear under mysterious circumstances. The school's PTA acts as if their bake sale is the most important event of the year. The kids in school are kept in line with a blood-stained baseball bat. There is an army base filled with nuclear missiles, which are at the disposal of a single deranged army general, who is missing the entire lower half of his body. The human intestinal tract is three miles long, he tells you. He used this to measure the distance he crawled when escaping from the enemy in World War II. If you even suggest that you might be some kind of pinko Commie bastard, he'll shoot in the head, then accidentally sit on The Button, bringing anhillation to everything.

Your father is locked in his room. He's taking a nap, your fake mom says. His room is also locked with security bars and a burglar alarm. Upon breaking inside, you him lying in a full body cast, in a bloodied room filled with sordid sex toys. He begins to tell you about the birds and the bees. "GET QUOTE"

The other inhabitants of Harvest range from silly to outright disturbing. Deputy Loomis has an extraordinary taste for pornography. One of the puzzles involves distracting him with a dirty magazine, so he can sneak off to a jail cell and have a wank. Meanwhile, the sheriff walks in on him and ruthlessly beats him like a dog with a rolled up magazine. NAME himself is no saint, either. One poor resident is brutally murdered, leaving only their bloody spinal cord.
She died of natural causes, he concludes, while eating a healthy serving of blood red pie. You can't live without a spine, after all.

NAME has a strange psychotic obssession with meat, and shows a particular interest in James, since his family runs the town's butcher facility. He also casually molests and buries one of the townschildren and no one else in town seems to pay it any mind. 

Not all of it is quite so dark, but it sure is bizarre. 
When buying the adult mag, the general store manager proclaims that they promote healthy interest in woman, because you wouldn't want to end up as a firemen. What seems like an off-color gay joke ends up being strangely literal when you later walk into the fire station and find a bikini brief-clad male model, who sits around all day and waits to be sketched. 


Undoubtedly the strangest -- and the most important -- is the town's obessession with the Lodge, a gigantic building in the center of the town. More than a mere Masonic society, its medieval apperance greatly clashes with the deranged Norman Wockwell Americana that surrounds it. It is run by monks in robes, and everyone wants to be a part of it. Membership is not simply as easy as filling out an application, although the first chapter of the game involves untangling that bit of bureaucracy. A good chunk of Harvester's play time is spent as part of the Lodge's initiation rituals, which involve various acts of burglary and vandalism. For as weirdly creative as the setting is, it's disappointing that so much of the puzzles revolves around breaking-and-entering, but there's an eventual justification for it, at least. While keying cars is relatively innocuous, soon James' reign of terror has much more consequences for the residents. It's not your fault, the members of the Lodge tell you, even though their arguments are far from convincing. 

The only sane townsperson is Stephanie, the next door neighbor. James and her are engaged, so everyone seems to say, but she's in the same sitation you are, unable to remember anything and clearly uncomfortable with the situation. She is confined to her room by her parents though, unable to actually do much other than sitting around. Instead, she acts as the moral center of Harvester, discussing the various events around town with you. You can confess to your crimes, if you want, although it doesn't actually have much a bearing on anything, except maybe to clear the player's own conscience. (You can also have sex with her, although her creepy father takes the liberty to peep in through the whole in the wall.) 

Once you've finally made it into the Lodge in the last third of the game, Harvester totally shifts gears and focuses on the depths of the mysterious building, and the evil society that dwells within it. Most of the game is surprisingly free of gore, but these climactic encounters really go all out with the absolutely absurd violence.

It also becomes more action-focused. The interface is a little bit weird. Clicking on an object wi ll

STUFF WITH FATHER

FINALE WITH STEPHANIE

Your handling of Stephanie's fate determines which finale you'll receive. In truly cynical fashion, neither are actually considered "good", although which is preferable is a matter of opinion, but both are satisfying in ways that most horror games aren't.

Narratively, Harvester is weirdly compelling. From a technical standpoint, it's merely adequate. The interface condenses the single-icon parser than had become the standard by the mid-90s. Left clicking once will look at a hotspot. If you can interact with it, you click it a second time. Movement is quick and expedient, since you can double click on exits to zap from locale to locale. The conversation system is frustrating, as it adds and detracts topics for seemingly arbitrary reasons. You're given the option to type in single word topics, although functionally it's almost useless, and never actually required.

All of the characters are digitized actors, and while the package comes with 3 CDs, full motion video sequences are relatively sparse, as most scenes are simply carried out with static portraits and voiceovers. The FMV is mostly used in the more violent sequences, often to absurd effects. Rather than using traditional gore special effects, like Phantasmagoria did, nearly all of it done with CGI. It actually looks even cheesier than most Z-grade pics, if that were possible, although it's appropriate given the nature of the story.

At the end of the day, Harvester definitely feels like it's satirizing something, but exactly what is anyone's guess. Beyond the broad parody of the idllyic 50s lifestyle, the overt shock value makes it hard to get a grasp of what it's actually trying to say, if anything. But beyond its crass exterior, there's actually a bit of heart at the core of Harvester, something atypical of much popular horror fiction. Combined with the weirdly memorably characters, it fulfills its role as a cult classic rather nicely.