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.

In the production of the Season 7 Episode 8 of South Park, "South Park is Gay!", creators Matt and Trey brainstormed the ending for hours, before coming up with a completely goofy out-of-the-blue third act that barely tied into the entertaining initial premise and have since referred to the episode as "one of their worst" due to this random reveal dragging down the entire setup; yet despite that, fans at large seem to have found the ending hilarious and have professed great enjoyment of Crab People.

The last two seconds of Iron Lung are the horror equivalent of Crab People.

The fact that stuff like this can be made and released for the public is probably the second scariest thing about this.

The scariest thing is that someone could play this and go "shit, this is deep."

Horrifying.

There's really no other way to put it. This game (and possibly franchise) is morally and creatively bankrupt. Between the shallow depictions of mental health whether there's dramatic zooms of the protagonist self harming or even going as far to have chapters end with you jumping off a building and the following interludes flash a suicide hotline message until the level loads or the awkward anime dub tier voice acting berate you with insults or commentary on your surroundings because Konami needs to remind you this is in a fact a serious game and they're afraid of leaving things to interpretation, I fail to see how the 2 hours I spent with this tech demo can leave me anticipation of the upcoming Silent Hill 2 remake or "missing the point".

This whole experience ends up feeling like a parody of the thing it's trying to comment and I don't think that's the takeaway someone with diagnosed BPD should be feeling.