I started playing Harvester last night at Kira's house. It is the single most convoluted adventure / horror game I've ever played. Seriously! I've jumped into projects like GoDot with absolutely no coding experience at all, and even that was more intuitive than this damn mess of a game! I currently have just made it inside a lodge after an industrial sized headache factory of arbitrary tasks to complete.
SPOILERS BELOW
My fiancé got murdered (supposedly) by this cult oddly just called "The Lodge". My mothers infant daughters eyes popped out of it's head and she gruesomly just squished its eyes back into the eye sockets!? Also, everyone in the town seems absolutely whacked out on their concept of humanity and "normalness". I mean the father of my fiance raped and buried a child, and we know he did it, yet his dumb as bricks wife just believes that he didn't do that. Also, the police man, when examining the bloodied remains of my fiance (of which only a spine and skull remained!) said it was a "NATURAL DEATH"?!?!?! LIKE WHAT THE FUCK?! Everyone in the town is just fucking batshit insane and no one seems to give a fuck that in the span of 3-4 days two buildings have just been arsoned, two people have hung themselves, someone was burned to death from an electrical leak, a young girl was kidnapped raped and buried, the teachers murder their students, the meat building has blood oozing from under the shutter doors and cats just casually roam all in and out of the building, the fire department doesn't seem to operate as a fire department and just is a gay porn commissioning site, the police department is more concerned about getting porn magazines than fighting crime, and a laundry list of other things that I can't even remember.
So, yes. A very messed up game. But, despite it being so weird, I actually enjoy it. Not because of the contents, but because of how different it is from modern media. This game is so unfiltered that it's intriguing. A lot of games nowadays are made with a coat of glossy censorship. That's not to say that all media is like this today, but more than it used to be since society and the internet is leaning more towards an all inclusive platform. This means nothing offensive, nothing controversial and nothing that might seriously unsettle people. Well I crave that unsettling! I love it when a game or piece of media makes me go "Wow what the fuck", because I want things that are deeper. That's primarily why my book will be unconventional, I just dislike the conventional nature of a lot of things since it makes them feel boring. I might be quite vague in my wording here, but I don't mean to shit on any "conventional" forms of work. I simply mean that I value pieces of work that aren't afraid to share some extremity. Harvester might not do that on a deep level, but I still respect it's gruesome gritty nature. I have read that it is purely shocking for the sake of it (which so far does appear true), but I hope that later on it will be more deepening.