Harvester

Questions?

Harvester was a point and click adventure game about High Scores released in the late 1990's that was meant to troll the concerned American public following the ESRB Scapegoat but was surprisingly a commercial failure and didn't turn as many heads as it set out to. It was created to spark drama following the recent speculation in American culture that violence in video games causes violence irl, but though heavily ignored by the main public, it gleaned a cult following by gamers who recognized its true potential as being the greatest game ever made to parody VG violence.

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Quick Game Guide

Harvest

You play the role of Steve Mason in the fictional town of Harvest, whose sole job is to embark on a few GTAesque missions to gain entry into the Masonic lodge. (Get it? Haha? Mason, Masonic?) Anyway the people in Harvest range from borderline disorder to schizophrenia, and the ones who aren't clearly out of touch are meant to be even more creepy because no one else in town seems to notice their clear psychological deviation.

With the exception of a token dark skinned wop who owns a barber shop (He dies first), everyone is the same ethnicity, and Harvest appears at its surface to be the embodiment of conservative America in its 50's glory.

Asking anyone about Steve's past leads you with the stock response: "You always were a kidder, Steve", which means that the only way you'll cure your apparent amnesia is by trolling the townspeople by keying cars and burning down buildings, all in increasingly threatening crimes to condition you to the grand crime of serial killing.

Point and Click Adventure (First Half)

• Your kid brother (Surprisingly he's the biggest fucking psychopath in the whole game and the only character you can't kill)
• Neglectful yet domineering mother (By typing "FUCK" she can be proposed to fuck you! However, taking her up on it she'll attempt to blow your head off)
• Ineffective Other Absent Other Parent (A nuclear family configuration for Serial Killers. See Henry Lee Lucas whose father was kicked around in a fucking wagon by his domineering mother just for laughs)

• Girl Next Door (Important to the plot, she puts out after 2 days of knowing her.)
• Her father (Who faps to her getting dressed through a bathroom peephole. Also, he later molests a loli and removes her spinal cord as part of a Masonic Ritual. When asked why he did this, he claims that she was asking for it. She's eight years old, for Christ's sake.)

• Old Lady who sells porno
• Schizoid Wasp Lady (Giving some cultural quirks about the collectivist hivemind of America or some shit)
• Police Officer (Can be blackmailed, big surprise)
• Masturbatory Police Deputy (Masturbates himself blind by the end of the game, lulz)
• Pyromaniac Postal Worker (Possibly Jewish)
• Resourceful Butcher (Possibly part Korean because he serves animal meat, though he could be Jewish because his motivation is to save money, but likely he's probably a Nigger because at the end it turns out he also serves human meat)
• Cowboy (Best Quote: "Violence is as American as Apple Pie and low SAT scores!")
• Hicks
• Multiple Personality Old Guy (Town Pervert)
• Paranoid War-hero waging war against the Rooskies
• Kid outside your house that threatens you for the paper (Tries to make a living doing a backwards job after being unemployed.)
• Loli (Just try showing her your porn and you'll get an instant Game-over, you sick fuck)
• Edna (Cougar. Most normal person in Harvest next to Stephanie, except she eventually hangs herself and her loli daughter after you burn down her diner.)
• Flaming Gays at the Fire Station (Pffft? Putting out fire with a bundle of sticks?)

After you finish doing mundane shit in Harvest, you eventually storm your way into the castle to predictably save your princess. Once there, then you're asked to insert the second CD and all laughable Hell breaks loose. After battling a series of random monsters to warm you up, you encounter a series of random people who further try and encourage you to kill by adding their own justification. Turn back now.

Hilarious Sidescroll Chainsaw-Clown Killing Murdering Y2K PC-DOS Gorefest (Second Half)

• Little Person as the Lodge's receptionist (Setting the light-hearted tone for the rest of the game)
• Unrelated monsters
• Pissy Janitor with a nailgun
• Chainsaw wielding clown
• Andre the Giant with an overdue library book
• Viet-Vet (justifies killing with his PTSD)
• Religious Nut (justifies killing by arbitrary religion)
• Gay Artist (justifies killing by high-society's demanding intrigue with the macabre)
• Federal Agent (justifies killing by the enforcing of law and encouraging abstinence. USE A SHOTGUN TO KILL HIM.)
• A shotgun that can't be reloaded
• Torture Master (justifies killing by Sadism)
• Gladiator (justifies killing by the natural order)
• Pale Chick (justifies killing by the enforcing of eurocentric beauty ideals)
• Whores
• A Mother reminding you that children are little shits, amirite?
• The Final Boss and ultimate Tough Decision: Marriage

The game usually takes most people 1 week to complete blind because some of the traps are honestly unfair with no indication on how to solve them. You can probably expect to die quite a few times after stumbling across some NPC who would've drawn their weapon on you simply because you'd chosen the wrong answer to an impossible to answer question.

Taking the Game Seriously

Harvester's Main Message

Incredibly awesome violence and gore aside, there's actually a message hidden within Harvester. The message is not so subtly divided equally between both endings, so either one you choose will leave you with the game's main Aesop.

GOOD ENDING: Roadrunner Cartoons

• "Don't you know that people who watch violence become violent themselves?"
• "That's bullshit Mom."

BAD ENDING: Getting Married (Lulz)

There's the alternate ending: where the game's message STILL can't be escaped: The Harvester scientists stand over your freshly dead corpse in an examination room discussing just how useless it is to use video games to create serial killers. Instead, they hint that genetics may play a bigger role in crime. (Which have proven scientific basis behind their contribution, which is not based on fridge brilliance created by politicians and overly concerned parents looking for something to blame)

If you're a SJW without the humor to see the message then you would've probably played your way through to find an ending fork that would leave a bad taste in your mouth either way. Otherwise, if you're like the rest of us and can actually perform higher than a freshly uprooted carrot on the SAT then you'd see that the game's message basically blurts out to the American public that if you actually believe that video games extraordinarily induce serial killing and violent psychopathy somehow, then you're a fucking idiot.

High Score: The Game

Even Retsupurae thinks this game is fucked up

The game itself lives on as a Top 100 for the most nerdy of gamers. Though it was largely ignored at its release and failed as the potential drama bomb that the developers meant for it to be (The developers complained that the programming took quite some time), decades later we can only speculate at just how much trolling it could have done had the compile-time not taken a few months longer than the anticipated release date.

Being that it's the career profession of YouTube LP'ers to review the best and worst of every gaming category, one can find a fuckload of videos of this game. Most are voiced over by internet personalities like Retsupurae and Phreakindee and all freak at the obscene amount of gore and violence that the game features.

Harvester uses hilariously obscene amounts of Full-Motion-Video gore to test the very idea that video games cause individuals to become serial killers. Attacking innocent NPCs in-game with something as weak as a pitchfork will lead to the defeated NPC to instantly explode to a gory shred of intestines, blood, piss, shit, semen and other vitreous entrails.

Despite this cartoonish bending of anatomy, Harvester continues to keep its tongue deep in its cheek without directly revealing the joke by hinting that the ridiculous amount of displayed violence in games isn't anything like the violence in the real world because to a greater extent, the ways that people typically die in violent games aren't ever really comparable to the way that people die IRL. I mean, jesus fuck people, how many times has your mom's pancreas instantly burst from her chest after a single baseball bat swing to the head?

If this wasn't obvious enough for you because you're a concerned parent, then later on in the game at the pre-ending ultimatum, it's directly stated in the dialogue that video game monsters don't fucking exist... yet somehow after battling through a tower of them, you're somehow expected to instantly become a serial killer from fighting them.. amirite?