Review Mazinkaiser 3/5 · Oct 9, 2019
Harvester: One Kooky Town
Harvester starts out as a point and click and turns into a rough combat simulator two-thirds of the way through, but weaves a gleefully sadistic (and eye-rollingly edgy and dumb) streak through the small town of Harvest.
Starting out as a man with no memory, Steve, you explore the town, meet its residents, and take upon strange tasks from the …
Harvester starts out as a point and click and turns into a rough combat simulator two-thirds of the way through, but weaves a gleefully sadistic (and eye-rollingly edgy and dumb) streak through the small town of Harvest.
Starting out as a man with no memory, Steve, you explore the town, meet its residents, and take upon strange tasks from the Lodge, a mysterious society in the town's center. Most of the initial part of the game is exploring what a strange and wacky town it all is. Mother cooking hundreds of cookies...for the trash. A woman in an abandoned house obsessed with wasps. Televising very violent television. A waist-less colonel with an itchy trigger finger on the switch of a gaggle of nukes. The only thing that stuck out of place was some mean-spirited (yes, even for 1996, no need to give the time period a pass) queer stereotypes, but that quickly gets lost amidst the violence and bloodshed throughout.
After the initial sheen of the town has worn off, the player will be gathering items and embarking on odd pranks to gain the Lodge's favor. There are plenty of ways to die and many of the inhabitants can be brutally killed, so the developers kept a handy save system that works anywhere outside of combat so the player can try all manner of weird things (giving the paper to the paperboy, not talking to the colonel about "Commies", setting buildings on fire).
Close to the end is where things kick into the weird and slightly frustrating. In this final area, combat happens frequently and while clicking on the enemy's area with a weapon equipped does the trick at first, weapons become more awkward to use and a gun is provided with barely enough ammo to survive a few final fights. It's a rough system that encourages save scumming more than good reflexes.
That said, Harvester doesn't really have a point of its strange and disturbing goriness. Dead children, wasps inside of newborns, exploding corpses, very violent S&M, child molestation, bad stereotypes, STDs - it's tempting to explore but will leave a bad taste in your mouth and perhaps a laugh along the way if you can keep your eyes from rolling.