YMMV / Harvester

• Anti-Climax Boss: Mr. Pottsdam. By the time you fight him, it's been established that he's probably the most evil person in Harvest (save possibly for the Sergeant-At-Arms). However, by that point you also have the scythe, which allows you to kill pretty much any enemy in about three hits. The resulting "battle" will most likely end up being Mr. Pottsdam hopelessly charging at Steve with two meat hooks and getting killed without even landing a hit on him.
• Anvilicious: Only if the story is serious about its "fictional violence makes you violent" message, which is doubtful; see the entry for Applicability below.
• Applicability: Is the message of the story (that video games create violent individuals) a critique on media or a Spoof Aesop? According to the game's creator, either interpretation can work.
• Audience-Alienating Premise: There is a reason why it only achieves cult-level popularity status; how exactly does one even advertise a game designed to be this obscenely depraved and transgressive towards the material it requires the player to involve themselves in? While the game's morals and commentary are interesting, there's no denying that actually getting someone to play it is a very tough sell.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment:
  • The Wasp Woman is practically a Big Lipped Alligator Character. She contributes nothing to the plot, you don't have to visit her house for any reason, and Steve can kill her without any repercussions. Which then leads to another example when she turns out to actually be half-wasp. Originally she actually factored into the plot. To distract the fireman in order to steal their bolt of cloth, Steve originally had the option to burn down the Wasp Woman's house to lure them away from the fire station. Steve's mom's line about her paper wasp nests being a fire hazard was meant to foreshadow this.
    • That being said, lore-wise her spiel about wasps in relation to society is another method of the Harvester's to try to mold Steve's outlook in the direction they want.
  • Most of the enemies and locations in the Lodge. Notable examples include a carnivorous plant and a clown with a chainsaw in a bloodstained birthday party room. The story explains why this is later on, though.
  • If you kill someone and get caught, but you have a Get Out of Jail Free Card, the sheriff drives you back home, puts you in bed, and kisses you while Steve looks on completely flabbergasted.
  • At the end of the day, Steve goes to bed and has nightmares of various gory scenes in the game...and a cheeseburger.
• Crazy Is Cool: Colonel Buster Monroe, the shell-shocked commie hunter. He's paranoid about communists and everything else that could be remotely related to them, but there's something impressive about a guy who has a button that triggers nukes below his torso and his performance steals the show.
• Critical Dissonance: When the game came out, it didn't sell very well, and was poorly received by critics. Nowadays, people generally seem to agree that it is competently made and actually has some interesting concepts. The implementation of real-time combat in certain sections is still unpopular, however.
• Crosses the Line Twice: So so much. Even when the game tries to be "serious", the game loves to dance across the line. Oftentimes, the player will likely struggle between being horrified and wanting to laugh.
• Cult Classic: The game has gathered a small (but devoted) fanbase over time, especially after the Something Awful Let's Play and the subsequent Wrongpurae.
• Demonic Spiders: Jimmy James, the paperboy, is a damage sponge who can kill you in quite literally a second if you don't have the right weapon.
• Disappointing Last Level:
  • The Lodge part of the game seems like it was rushed through development. Many of its ideas seems like they were squeezed in at the last minute and come across as rather half-finished.
  • Others may find it to be the game's Awesome Video Game Level for throwing everything out the window and going completely insane with the concept of the game.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Mr. Pottsdam, due to the funny moments stemming from his meat obsession.
  • Sheriff Duane Dwayne and Deputy Loomis as well.
  • Out of the townspeople with minimal importance to the plot, Clem Parsons and Colonel Buster Monroe seem to be the most popular.
  • Edna Fitzpatrick as well for being one of the few sane people in Harvest.
• Game-Breaker: The scythe. It can kill just about any enemy in around three or four hits.
• Harsher in Hindsight: If you show the photo of Miss Whaley and Principal Herill having sex to Karin, an eight-year old, twice, you'll get arrested. This becomes so much worse once you learn that Steve's actor got arrested for owning child pornography in his later years. Actually, knowing this, everything about Steve saving Karin after she got molested and buried alive by Mr. Pottsdam becomes Dramatic Irony. With this information in mind, the overuse of the phrase "You always were a kidder, Steve" becomes a lot worse.
• Heartwarming Moments:
  • Saving Karin brings about a sweet cutscene where she is reunited with Edna. Unfortunately, this makes the Player Punch involving the diner that much more heartbreaking.
  • The good ending. Steve chooses to spare Stephanie's life, declaring that he'd rather die than become a serial killer. The two both die, but they spend a peaceful lifetime together Happily Married in the simulation.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Nowadays, the Order of the Harvest Moon sound far less ominous, being mostly associated with a series of non-violent farming sims.
  • The guy on the cover looks an awful lot like the Raincoat Killer.◊
• It Was His Sled:
  • Harvest isn't real. It's a virtual reality simulation designed to breed serial killers.
  • Stephanie seemingly dies and only a spinal cord is left of her. It's not much of a spoiler when it's shown in some trailers and back covers.
• Memetic Badass: In the Retsupurae fandom — Steve is one when compared to Mike Dawson, the Memetic Loser protagonist of the Dark Seed duology. Many people like to point out the similarities between the two games, but they are usually in agreement that Steve is a much better protagonist than Mike. To quote a YouTube comment, and a reply to said comment:
  "If Steve were in DarkSeed he would've killed all of the Ancients with his scythe, scored on his first ring toss throw, and fucked Rita (while her dad watched from behind a painting)."
  "And mike would still be in the bathroom...thinking."
  • Also worth noting that in the censored version of Harvester, Steve was renamed to Mike.
• Memetic Mutation: Retsupurae's Wrongpurae of Harvester appears to have started popularizing "You always were a kidder, Steve" (the oft-repeated response to Steve insisting his amnesia is real) and "BYE" (the almost universal prompt to end a conversation. It helps that "BYE" is a very appropriate response to any of the creepier residents of Harvest.
• Moral Event Horizon: This is ultimately a game about them, but there are two characters in particular worth discussing.
  • Mr. Pottsdam crosses it when he molests a girl and buries her alive just so he can get into the Lodge.
  • Steve can pass it at any point in the game once the player obtains a weapon, should the player choose to kill someone and use the "Get Out Of Jail Free" Card — the player can even murder a kid and get away with it. The official example occurs in the Bad Ending, where he can kill Stephanie in order to become a real serial killer.
• Narm Charm: Say what you want about the goofy FMVs or the silly acting. Occasionally, the game will blindside you with a rather creepy (and jarringly well-acted) character comment. And other times, its cheesy special effects only makes some of the scary scenes worse than they would have been with modern graphics.
• Nausea Fuel: For those who don't find it Narm considering the outdated graphics, the gore can be this. Special mention goes to the examples under Nightmare Fuel below, especially the second example which shows Steve's "sister"'s eyes popping out due to baby wasps crawling out and her mother popping them when trying to push them back in.
• No Such Thing as Bad Publicity: Behind the scenes, the game's creator very deliberately tried to lean into this. When David Walsh of the National Institute on Media and the Family released a list of games that he considered to be excessively violent in December 1996, the game's producer, Lee Jacobson, publicly demanded that Harvester should be added to the list.
• Player Punch:
  • The game frequently highlights the consequences of Steve's actions (albeit very exaggerated), but none works quite like the fallout from Day 5’s little bit of vandalism. Steve burns down Edna’s Diner. Edna is so distraught that she hangs both herself and Karin, if you had just saved them a few days ago.
  • The Bad Ending is the epitome of this in the game, also serving as a You Bastard! moment for the player. After all, if the only two choices left in the game were killing Stephanie and becoming a serial killer, or sparing Stephanie and living out the rest of your simulated life in peace, why would you choose the first one?
• Rewatch Bonus: There's actually a lot of foreshadowing towards the big twist and a lot of seemingly inexplicable things make much more sense upon replay. A very good example is how almost all the mothers in Harvest look the same; the programmers of the simulation got lazy and reused the template with a few tweaks.
• Scrappy Mechanic: Real-time combat in a point and click rarely works very well. This is not one of the times it does.
• Special Effect Failure:
  • The game's many attempts at gore during the FMVs fall short; the effects were rotoscoped in afterwards, with many looking like they were edited in two minutes with MS Paint.
  • The most horrifying scene in the game detailed under Nightmare Fuel is somewhat blunted by the fact that the cannibal children are plainly just the same kid copied three times (even if there might be an in-story reason for it).
• Tear Jerker: After Day 5, when Steve burns down Edna's Diner and discovers that she has hung both herself and potentially Karin after doing so. The sight of Sheriff Duane Dwayne eating pie dulls the impact a little, but the scene with the suicide note and the hung body still manages to be somewhat poignant, especially since Edna and Karin were part of the few actually nice people in Harvest.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Aside from her first and only appearance (which is optional to begin with), the Wasp Woman has absolutely no impact on the plot. If you talk with her about her philosophy on wasps, there is some foreshadowing there, but that's about it.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: The ending can be seen as this, because rationalizing the screwed-up nature of the town somewhat takes away from how creepy it is once you know it's just a simulation. The fact that it's somewhat metaphorical makes up for it a little, but it still makes the game far less of a Mind Screw.
• Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: The sheer level of depravity on display in Harvest can lead to this reaction among some players. Unusually, this may well be at least partly intentional, as in the context of the game itself, the Harvesters would be delighted if Steve stopped giving a damn about the town and wanted everyone in it to just die already...
• Values Resonance: Harvester's satire has surprisingly aged well because of the fact that Moral Guardians are still using violent video games as a scapegoat for big murder crimes and are still under the belief that they create serial killers.
• The Woobie: Pretty much any character deserving of sympathy.
  • Steve is this, should the player try and take the high road throughout the game.
  • Stephanie, who is put through a situation worse than Steve's and is the only normal person in Harvest.
  • Steve's dad is a victim of some serious psychological, physical, and sexual abuse.
  • Deputy Loomis. Sure, he may be kinda creepy and obsessed with porn, but unlike a lot of the other sexually-obsessed characters in Harvest, he never actually does anything wrong — he's not a child molester and he doesn't harass anyone, he just wants some adult magazines.
  • Edna Fitzpatrick, especially if the player waits too long and allows Karin to die.

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