One of the things that really disturbed me about Harvester as a child was this one scene where a baby is sleeping in a crib and its eyes begin to pop out, and the mother is like "Oh, it's not as bad as it looks. Just pop them back in." and just something about it made me feel incredibly queezy. On the other hand, the scene itself has a strange satirical quality to it - and that's something which is pretty much present throughout the entirety of this game where it combines horror and comedy in a way that's really strange, disturbing but then also weirdly funny in a way.
There's something else about the heavily dated, predominantly FMV styled visuals playing in conjunction with deliberately dated 1950s idealist visuals which feels really memorable - and just something about it feeling so grotesquely dated just adds so much to the alien atmosphere that it creates, like peering into another world and you're just aware of it being strangely artificial and alien - lots of it comes down to how much this game is dependent on really cartoonish satirical caricatures.
It's janky as all hell, and I think some people have dismissed this as downright awful - but then there is a strange appeal to this game's storytelling and weirdly morbid sense of humour in conjunction with the grotesque violence of it, and there's definitely something about it which works. It very much forces you to confront violent content and the implications of it, and there's an explicit satire with cults manifesting themselves in suburbia and the connection that the player has with the game and what they see.
Also, the line "You always were a kidder, Steve." will get stuck in your head. It's repeated ad-nauseum throughout, and there's definitely something funny about Steve's dumb expression when he's watching all of these strange and disturbing events unfold - or when he's killed, for instance, by a legless veteran who mistakes you for a communist and shoots you but also accidentally triggers a nuclear apocalypse in the process.
There's something else about the heavily dated, predominantly FMV styled visuals playing in conjunction with deliberately dated 1950s idealist visuals which feels really memorable - and just something about it feeling so grotesquely dated just adds so much to the alien atmosphere that it creates, like peering into another world and you're just aware of it being strangely artificial and alien - lots of it comes down to how much this game is dependent on really cartoonish satirical caricatures.
It's janky as all hell, and I think some people have dismissed this as downright awful - but then there is a strange appeal to this game's storytelling and weirdly morbid sense of humour in conjunction with the grotesque violence of it, and there's definitely something about it which works. It very much forces you to confront violent content and the implications of it, and there's an explicit satire with cults manifesting themselves in suburbia and the connection that the player has with the game and what they see.
Also, the line "You always were a kidder, Steve." will get stuck in your head. It's repeated ad-nauseum throughout, and there's definitely something funny about Steve's dumb expression when he's watching all of these strange and disturbing events unfold - or when he's killed, for instance, by a legless veteran who mistakes you for a communist and shoots you but also accidentally triggers a nuclear apocalypse in the process.