This is my review of Harvest Island in just two minutes
Touted as "Stardew Valley but horror" by… pretty much everyone, Harvest Island is a game that feels easy to market to your mates. Grab a life sim, throw in a dark mystery under what appears to be a reactive and somewhat evolving land and you have a reason to test it out. Mostly, it succeeds at being spooky but fails in other areas.
In Harvest Island, you play an older brother and only son in a small homestead, confined to looking after your baby sister and obeying your oddly strict father. Children are the easiest main characters for these kinds of stories because they are too curious and naive for their own good. An adult knows better than to chase the blood trail into a mountain and Harvest Island is never quite clever enough to trick you into having a reason to go searching without having the heart of a child. It does justify its decision to use children to tell that story but the story often feels carried by naivety
Relationships are contrived and often one-note, seldom evolving past the caricature they start as. They do become more nuanced as the game gets on but I felt a lot of the decisions aren't given room to grow from somewhere more grounded and honest. You are playing a game and some of the game's story beats make you very aware of that fact.
When it gets going, there is quite a lot to like. You are left battling between that part of your brain that wants to hoard resources to upgrade your little farm and that much deeper itch in the back of your mind that wants to know why your dad keeps telling you to stay away from the centre of the forest.
If you finally start to take those brave steps outside of your little world, Harvest Island's storytelling is genuinely quite intriguing, if a little ham-fisted at points. It reminds me of all those RPG Maker horror games I'd played a decade ago and this is both a good and a bad thing. Harvest Island is actually made in RPG Maker and this comes through from rudimentary farming systems to tile-based movement. Playing this filled me with some of that dread I felt as a kid but also held a magnifying glass up to many of the functions I take for granted in more traditional life sims. Although it has those systems, Harvest Island only feels like it intends for you to use them to get to the next stage. You won't suddenly find yourself in your fifth year of the game, still building resources.
It should take you about twenty hours to get through but I suspect it can be beaten much quicker than this if you plan your resources wisely and know what you're doing. Though I enjoyed it in many moments, that grind does become rather sluggish partially due to how limited exploration is for most of the game. You have many avenues to explore at the start but mechanically, nothing is quite deep enough to reward you for playing more and, thus, it keeps the same pacing throughout most of the game
Harvest Island feels like an excuse to make a horror life sim and not a reason to. It has an intriguing story at its core and many nice ideas but its many sliding parts never quite align to build out a full picture.
A code was given for the purposes of critique
26 сен 2024
