Oddities: Harvester

Welcome to Oddities, a weekly feature in which we plunge head-first into the bargain bin of gaming history to extract a single game that you’ve either never heard of, or probably wished you hadn’t. This series follows some of the strangest, most obscure and most incredibly awful games that have ever appeared since the invention of Spacewar!. They won’t all be bad games, but we’ll make it our mission to find the really, really weird stuff. This week we’ve got a real winner in the form of Harvester:

This series was practically made for a game like Harvester. When it comes to weird and frankly random games from the bargain bin, this real oddity takes the golden prize. Harvester is a point-and-click mystery-adventure game developed exclusively for PC during the 90s. It began its life during the height of the videogame violence debates of 1991, setting itself as a stark ‘conformer’ to the violent image that gaming had come to represent at that time. People were afraid of games turning their children into mindless killers, so Lee Jacobson and DigiFX Interactive gave them exactly what they feared.

The game centres around Steve, a hapless teenager who wakes up one day completely unaware of his surroundings, seemingly suffering from a rather acute state of insomnia. He doesn’t recognise his own family, let alone the bizarre town of Harvest in which the whole nightmare is taking place. Of course, no one believes his sudden loss of memory - “you always were a kidder”, he’s told by just about every citizen of the town. Everything’s out of whack and the only thing that makes sense early on is that everyone in this deranged town has an odd fascination with The Lodge, a noticeably different-looking building in the centre of the town that seems to harbour some sort of cult - The Order of the Harvest Moon. Yeah, definitely a cult.

In order to make sense of the whole situation, Steve decides that he needs access to The Lodge where he believes his answers await. That’s no easy feat though, The Order will only accept applicants who perform a series of tasks for them (handily though, application forms can be picked up from the local post office). That’s where things start to get weird - and we mean really weird. One of the first signs of Harvest’s less than sane populace is the Colonel who presides over an on-site nuclear missile facility by himself. An unusual situation made even more so by the fact that the Colonel is missing the lower half of his body - apparently, during the war, he had to use his intestines as a measuring tool to find his way back home.

If you thought that was a little tame then fear not, it gets a lot worse. There’s the butcher who doesn’t seem to follow standard regulations on meat choice (Dog being his primary cut), the teacher who keeps her children in line with a baseball bat and a man who has a rather morbid obsession with any kind of meat (Dog or otherwise). There’s a scene in which that same teacher actually beats a student to death, as well as a scene in which Steve (with the help of the player) causes a woman to commit suicide, taking her child with her - all of which is displayed on-screen. The whole thing is even more creepy given the use of real-life actors and Full-Motion Video (FMV).

Wait, we forgot to mention that while Steve’s ‘Dad’ remains hidden for a large part of the game, he comes across the poor bugger part way through completely covered in a cast. He’s clearly terrified of Steve’s mum and the room he’s in is splattered in blood with sex toys lying all over the place - one can only assume what’s gone on in this hell hole while Steve’s Dad gives a rather unusual accounting of the birds and the bees, “just watch out for the hobby horse and the jello!” The death and desolation is made worse by a town sheriff who’s laughably inept at his job. Upon discovering a human skull with only a spinal cord attached, Steve calls fowl play, “this death was unnatural.” “You can’t live without a spinal cord son, nothing unnatural about that.”  Brilliant.

The only slight reprieve for Steve (and the player) is a girl called Stephanie who also has no memory of her life in Harvest. She provides a sane voice and way to rationalise the situation. Unsurprisingly, considering the superficial teen male target audience, she’s an attractive blonde who you see in her underwear on a couple of occasions. In fact, it’s even possible to point the story towards an uncomfortable sex scene between Stephanie and Steve, made even more uncomfortable by her dad, who watches the two go at it through the keyhole in the door.

By the time you’ve got through all that nonsense The Lodge awaits, filled with all manner of horrors. From a demented birthday party to a battle with an STD riddled stripper, the final section of the game stands up in front of the Liebermann gaming censorship council and pisses in front of them. It’s violent, disturbing, gory and all comes with an odd sexual edge. It culminates in a twist ending in which Steve has actually been plugged into a virtual reality machine all along. The game is a training programme to turn him into a real-life serial killer - a rather unsubtle nod towards the nature of the game itself. Although the player can choose an alternate path that leads to Steve and Stephanie enjoying a life together in the simulation (but dying in real life).

Harvester is a silly game really, and the point-and-click puzzle gameplay never fits in with the gory plot. Through the exaggerated characters, visuals and twist ending it’s a clear attempt at parody. Yet it’s so impossibly bizarre that the parody eventually fails; it’s just a violent game arguably for violent people - or those with a fascination for the morbid, at least. It’s worth checking out on YouTube just for the laugh, but we can’t possibly recommend it - especially if there’s a chance it’ll turn you into a serial killer.