Harvester (video game)

A graphical point-and-click adventure game, released in 1996.

The only thing Steve knows about himself is that his name is Steve, and he's really just taking that on faith. Initially, the neighborhood may appear to be a perfect Stepford Suburbia, but with even more things wrong than usual. Mom is baking (thousands of) cookies in preparation for a bake sale that's still a week away. Of course, they won't be good then, so she's shoveling them into the trash. Steve's baby brother lies screaming in his crib, neglected. Steve's brother Hank is immovable from in front of the television, where he watches a disturbingly gory and realistic show about cowboys killing Native Americans, not much of a plot or anything, just killing them over and over, the "special effects" make it disturbingly real.

Mom informs Steve that when the big day comes, the town's Lodge will have a big blood drive, and everyone has to give blood. Well, except for Lodge members. Steve should consider joining the Lodge. Steve decides to join the Lodge, if he makes it past the paper boy that is. See, times have been tough around Harvest since the newspaper building burned down, and a guy's gotta do what a guy's gotta do, right? Well, if there aren't any newspapers being made, then our lad has decided to pick them up. He'd really appreciate it if you could help him out, just leave a newspaper for him outside every day... or there might be some consequences.

Upon visiting the Lodge, the Lodge's Sergeant-at-Arms informs Steve telepathically that the Lodge has standards Steve must meet in order to apply, and for today's task, Steve must steal or otherwise acquire an application to the Lodge. Each day, Steve is given a successively worse task. From stealing an antique barber pole from its shop (how was Steve supposed to know that the wires from the pole's light would land in a puddle of water, or that the shopkeep would be standing in that puddle when he went to go turn the pole on in the dark...) to outright arson (which provokes suicide), Steve finds himself becoming more and more the villain in his own tale, but he can't stop... he has to join the lodge before the blood drive. Everyone has to help with the blood drive, Steve.

Needless to say, considered one of the most disgusting games ever created. Harvester is a reaction to, and Deconstruction of, the idea that video games promote violence, taking it to its furthest extreme in the idea that video games create serial killers. Steve is a normal boy who's been abducted and placed into an incredibly detailed Virtual Reality simulation, the ultimate goal of which is to turn him into a serial killer, essentially a boy put into a video game that will make him a killer, or kill him. Because of the game's graphic nature, it was banned in Germany, heavily censored in the UK, and never released in Australia at all, as the distributor felt there would be no point as the game would just get banned anyways. In the US, the game received heavy attention from Moral Guardians and Media Watchdog types. Harvester set out to offend the hell out of anyone who took it seriously, while simultaneously using a quirky sense of humor for anyone else (e.g. when asked about Edna, the owner of the local diner, Mr. Johnson announces that what "she really needs" is a penis). The game's goal is both to make you laugh at certain points and be horrified at others, it's a rare person that Harvester cannot make squirm at some point.

""We don't believe in 'Spare the rod and spoil the child.' A rod is too thin. But a baseball bat…""
 * Arc Words: "You always were a kidder, Steve."
 * Black Comedy: Harvest's more… peculiar elements are frequently Played for Laughs.
 * Broken Aesop: Arguable..
 * But Thou Must!: You will join the Lodge, whether you like it or not. Oh, and you will commit crime after crime, all because some guy in front of a door keeps telling you to.
 * Also Option B seems to be that the Lodge will come for your blood in the Blood Drive, if you're not a member.
 * Camp Gay: The Harvest Fire Department. They drive a pink fire truck, and spend their spare time drawing pictures of naked men. Easily one of the least insulting moments of the entire game.
 * Chainsaw Good: Subverted. You can pick up a chainsaw (after killing its former owner, a birthday clown), and it is one of the most powerful melee weapons in the game. However, it has limited fuel, burns through its ammo supply quickly, and by the time you get it, you'll probably have much more reliable weapons on hand.
 * Corrupt Hick: Sheriff Dwayne: big on pie eating, light on crime fighting. Unless it's Steve that's breaking the law.
 * The Corruption:.
 * Dead Baby Comedy: ...Well ...not much more to say, really.
 * Death by Sex: If you sleep with the hooker in the Lodge, you get a STD that will kill you if you don't find the vaccine.
 * Deconstruction Game: Mocking Video Game Cruelty Potential and the idea that Evil Is Cool.
 * Downer Ending:.
 * Actually, when Steve reaches Stephanie, he has to either kill her or marry her. Marrying her is actually the better of two Downer Endings you can get. If you kill her, well....
 * Easter Egg: Found during a Let's Play that was experimenting with curse words in the text parser. It turns out, asking Steve's mother to.
 * The End of the World as We Know It: You know the button that launches all those nukes? Maybe they shouldn't have put it directly under a mentally unstable torso-man with a recoil-heavy machine gun.
 * Eye Scream: Cat-o-Nine Tails, plus mutant inbreed's face, equals devastation.
 * Fingore: A really nasty one occurs in the bad ending.
 * Four-Star Badass: Colonel Buster Monroe. The bastard got his entire lower body shot off during WWII, so what did he do? He crawled all the way from Germany to England, stopping every few miles to wind his intestines back in. In any other game, that'd just be ludicrous; here, it's par for the course.
 * General Ripper: Colonel Monroe. Just try to piss him off.
 * Gorn: There WERE a few genuinely chilling scenes, however.
 * Infant Immortality: Steve's brother Hank cannot be killed no matter what. Subverted with Karin; killing her though collapses the plot and gives you an instant Game Over. You can also kill Jimmy the paper boy... if he doesn't kill you first.
 * Steve's baby brother, while he can't be killed, eats a wasp and... other things happen...
 * It's All Upstairs From Here: The Lodge mostly consists of killing everything in your way and climbing to the next floor.
 * Large Ham: Appropriately enough, Mr. Pottsdam. "Meat! MEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEAT!"
 * The Many Deaths of You: There are a lot of ways to die in combat, especially in the Lodge. Some of the more memorable deaths, however, only occur by means of Non-Standard Game Overs.
 * Moral Guardians: When it was released, one angry guardian claimed that one particular scene, involving the decapitation of an infant, was so horrifying that she literally could not believe it wasn't real. Yes. She believed the makers of Harvester murdered a baby.
 * Murder Simulators:.
 * New Media Are Evil: Played for Laughs with Boyle, who blames television for the fall in mail circulation, and has already burned the local TV station down at least once..
 * Pet the Dog: Steve rescuing Karin from Mr. Pottsdam early in Day 3..
 * Real Men Eat Meat: Mr. Pottsdam subscribes to this philosophy. ...
 * Refuge in Audacity/Refuge in Vulgarity: EVERYTHING! The whole point of this game was to piss off the Moral Guardians. IT SUCCEEDED.
 * Sadist Teacher: The town's school is staffed entirely by this..

"Mr. Pittsdam: This town won't be the same without DNA's diner. Or DNA, for that matter."
 * Shoot the Shaggy Dog: The whole game is an escalating series of these, culminating in.
 * Signs of Disrepair: Edna... scratch that, 'DNA'S DINER.'


 * Stepford Smiler: Both Steve's Mom and Mrs. Pottsdam.
 * In fact, your mother, Stephanie's mother, and every other mother in the game are all played by the same actress, as though they had been mass produced.
 * Thriving Ghost Town: Played Straight. Harvest boasts a population of 51... and dropping.
 * Title Drop: "You can't live in Harvest without being a Harvester."
 * Tomato in the Mirror:.
 * Town with a Dark Secret: The town of Harvest. It is clear from the get-go that Harvest is not a nice place to live, and nobody even tries to hide that. Despite this, it does contain a Dark Secret like you would not believe..
 * Video Game Cruelty Potential: You can kill almost everyone. Hell, only a few even bother to fight back! And that's not including all the killing Steve has to do…
 * Video Game Cruelty Punishment: If you kill anyone, Steve is arrested and executed immediately.
 * There's actually a random element to this. Certain characters not essential to the plot can be killed, and whether or not Steve gets away with it seems to be random chance. Namely, there seems to be some percentage chance that killing the mortician will go unpunished.
 * There's also a way to blackmail the sheriff, which results in a "Get Out of Jail Free" Card, which allows you to get away with killing a single NPC who isn't essential to the plot.
 * Violence Discretion Shot: Parodied, as the only such shot in the whole game is used for a scene where the sheriff smacks his deputy with a rolled-up newspaper.
 * Wide Open Sandbox: Steve can go anywhere in Harvest during the day, including places that have no actual bearing on the game itself. A few puzzles even allow for alternate solutions in this way.
 * Womb Level: One of the least disturbing things Steve fights through in the Lodge.
 * Would Hurt a Child: Steve. Very much so.
 * Also... just about everyone in Harvest.
 * You Bastard: If you actually enjoy Harvester at any point, you are a monster. The game itself tells you this, and it's trying to entertain you!