A strange satire of many things
Harvester is a well-made 2D point-and-click adventure that goes for a lot of things.
It pokes fun at the USA of the 1950's, with all its apple pie, purity and skeletons in the closet... but the way it does this is by being acutely aware of many a horror cliche, told in the fever dream style of Twin Peaks and Kafka, with a touch of the X-Files. With that many thematical elements it's amazing how coherent the game manages to be. It could have easily been a mish-mash of cool ideas from various devs with no rhyme or reason to it. Yeah, and it's violent in the splatterhouse sort of way as well.
Harvester has aged pretty well. The FMV bits aren't very high quality as such, but they're not amateurishly done and the acting is, especially for a game of this era, very good. It's also fine from a technical standpoint, although one might have to adjust Dosbox's CPU cycles in order to bypass a few minor glitches.
The puzzles are the game's one weakness, but it feels unfair to put it that way, since there are multiple solutions available in numerous scenarios. Still, it's easy to find yourself stuck, because you failed to find that one small hotspot in a sea of dithered pixels. Or, because you discarded your previous course of action because you thought it didn't work, while you were doing the right thing but in a way the developers hadn't thought. (There's a day-night cycle that affects what actions are available to you; if you haven't picked up the correct items, you can't proceed. This is the biggest issue for many players, I understand.)
All in all, it's a fine adventure game with a sinister and humorous atmosphere. If you like the aforementioned TV shows/authors, David Lynch or maybe the Residents, and aren't afraid to check a walkthrough every now and then, go for it!
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