The first time I hurt someone was over a videogame. Not something playground, not something as a child who should know better but a child who shouldn’t. The first place I was raised on online was an area where hurting people and the ability to do it well was seen as kind of a privilege – a top down hierarchy of young men and women over young boys and girls. An online roleplaying game set in a violent, fantasy world. It’s also the first time I had someone express interest in me – or the kind of soldier of fortune simulacrum of teenagehood I could create as a character.
A person who spent years going back and forth with me over the direction of the server was finally spun up enough that I took an afternoon delight dismantling everything about the game they liked in conversation. I remember it ending with a declaration I had won something (I hadn’t won anything) and them taking themselves off of the server for months at a time. That person and I feuded in a way that only got more intimate and more destructive with time. Nowadays, some of the older men and women who ran the server have a discord where they congratulate themselves on The Good Ol’ Days.
This is the kind of place where an adult man could go to tell you to kill yourself for not doing things The Right Way. There are still lofty memories I have of this place that will not go away for anything. Something turned into armor as if life was a constant fight to survive. It is not a fight, unless you feel like killing someone else (or yourself.) In as much as I can tell I lived those years of my life.
The next time I hurt someone was over videogames – though this plays out more like a mystery game than a puzzle. There is no smoking gun but a friendship brought pretty close by the obscure. I’ve been a desperate person and now when I go out I can see and recognize a certain kind of hunger. They’re sitting in the eyes of people who feel unchosen by the community or group they identify with going through a type of hollowing. From the inside out, the cheeks get thinner no matter how much weight they put on and the eyes sink back in. Too many nights thinking. Too many nights thinking.
This is where my editor gives me shit every time they lock eyes on a Deep-Hell article. My editor should know at one point one of these rounds should be on me: so anyway, Harvestella is a Square Enix published videogame directed by a smaller studio sharing staff across a Mobile Game tethered to the Chrono Trigger developer, and another videogame tied to former Fire Emblem staffers. Is your head spinning yet? I promise all of this stuff is going to be important later. But -(em dash) I won’t promise you a round on me.
Harvestella is a game where nothing can hurt you. Don’t get me wrong: it’s an action roleplaying game, which means there’s a lot of killing things. Here the time in the field hacking is metered out by time in a different field, slashing grass. Every morning is a pernicious ritual where all of you daily money comes from tilling a small plot of soil and using what you farm to fill your belly and bank account.
I play videogames because I’m a bit of a voyeur. Let me correct myself: I find out which games to play because I’m a bit of a voyeur. You’ll never know for sure if that game we rarely see our friends play but which they recommend to us constantly is actually good. However, we’re all functioning as a social panopticon at all times: you will know if the game your friend is playing at 3am every day for two weeks is good. That’s where the real human lives, what we all yearn for. Having enough spoiled time to stay up until the sun rises playing videogames. Luckily, I’ve knocked on Kaile’s door before.
Video games come to us from the result of that vile dog Capital and like everything extended to us from it, the beast is large enough to black out the sun and fits under every stone. Tom Nook will give and take from you immediately in Animal Crossing. A home is something built, but a house is only provided for money. Stardew Valley likewise asserts that you have the freedom to become sole proprietor of your grandfather’s farm – but also the sole insurer. Without you the farm will rot, the local community is without fresh food. In this constructed paradise meant to be cozy the player is looked to as an island. Community support is often leveraged in a way that the impetus is on the player to choose someone to fuck, to mate with. Gifts and food are exchanged as a transaction to find primarily an end of game token (where available) that can be mounted on a wall, closed off in a save file and retired. 
Harvestella is not really a game about hurting people. There are animals, vegetables, minerals to hurt. Villains cry for redemption or exist as misunderstood arbiters of a world they lucked into being born in. Quests are tethered by umbilical to the mothers and fathers of the game that lay just out of sight. “Harvestella is Nierly There” is something I wanted to write as the tktk but still a little bit hyperbole. The Great Square Enix Machine has, like always, used the industrial power of publishing money to render the finished project like something overly cleaned.
I’m not sure who first coined the phrase “There’s an interesting game buried under here.” It could have been a person Ben Hornsby or Tim Rogers on Actionbutton.net — that might very well have been a forum post on one of those critique heavy webforums that seemed to be everywhere from 2014 to the 2020s.
The shape of games criticism has formed less around arbitration of what makes a game good or mechanically honest. In part, critics have done the work in admitting they don’t (unless they have) know how to make a videogame, and that what that leaves room for is primarily engaging with the product that’s actually in front of them and not one they wished existed.
As Kaile Hultner writes for Noescape Harvestella is filled with moments of listening to children and communicating between adults. Taken as a rarity, it does make me question why Simulation style Roleplaying Games often only include Children as an element for players to be routinely impeded by until they eventually kill them ala Bethesda’s Skyrim or solely as the victims of violence perpetrated by the script to make the player feel something. We’ve uniquely got our own refrigerator problem with children in videogames, how bout that?
Harvestella’s pedigree of staff seem more determined to work in the texture of Reconstruction. There’s a good Nier joke buried in a paragraph above this one, well, I’m getting around to it. Much like that game, here we take the role of protagonist in a doomed world and are soon placed in a situation where we must take care of someone else. Nier (depending on version) focuses on the relationship between Father and Daughter. Here the circumstances are changed: we find ourselves as roommates to a woman of similar age and circumstance to ourselves who is not so helpless in the world — she is alone in it.
Her relationship with the world is still a part of our responsibility.
As players our job is not just as farmers and adventurers, but we seem to be the middleman in the relationship of communities around us. Most of the subquests and routes have very little to do with dungeon crawling and more to do with brokering connections between two people who cannot come to an understanding. Not unlike the way more modern tabletop roleplaying games ask players to work with the narrative texture of the world rather than against it: we have the term murderhobo referencing players with no stake in the world who seemingly exist to kill NPC’s and collect treasure.
There’s so little to anchor the quests to the dungeon crawling that letting myself loose and playing the game like other dungeon crawlers meant I found myself eternally returned to the same areas. Like I was being told to slow down, there’s no time limit here. I love frantically and obsessively ticking off side quests in a roleplaying game: I’ve gotta get a healthy outlet for my enemies to lovers relationship with deadlines somewhere.
I delighted in killing Drakengard’s haunted children back when I was the age to go “That’s fucked up!”. Taro got me again in Nier where even after I learned the enemies in the game were their own people with hopes and desires — to go “That’s fucked up!” If it’s so fucked up man, don’t make the unique sticky drifty combat feel so good! Or maybe it should feel so good because we as players are going to do it anyway. There’s no “That’s fucked up!” Moment in Harvestella. I kept waiting but it never came. I’m so used to a still immature style of RPG storytelling, I learned.
Harvestella feels guided by the troubles of the developers. Much of the staff worked in close relationship with some of the teams that gave us games like Chrono Trigger a game almost excessive in the way it can bury sadness deep in the plot only to turn around and offer resolution that still respects the stakes. I won’t say Harvestella is entirely capable of doing that, but I almost wonder how much of that attitude staff involved in this game picked up working with the senior developers behind Another Eden.
And I wonder then if the reason I haven’t returned to Harvestella and its comforts is the other half of the quest scripts: taking care of a lot of less fortunate, older, elder figures. I am surrounded by people in my personal life in a real sense that have been where I am now before. Where our protagonist in the game has the autonomy to help in a real sense I find myself instead looking to anyone to be that figure, to come in and fix things in a real way.
Will something happen if I don’t? Does the quest end differently as a real person? The strength of reconstruction can sometimes be in simply examining what’s been taken apart from a different perspective.
The developers of the game made a statement that there’s no harsh time limit and there’s no limit to how long the player can play after the storylines are evolved. The day night cycle will keep ticking the next time the player logs in. Maybe they can come back and buy that last farm upgrade or just go hang out in their favorite area. I long for that — coming back to a place with no work to do, no forward momentum. I avoid helping the kids and the farm will wait for me.
The sweet-sugar overload feeling that comes from things like Dragon Quest Builders took things like that permanently out of my diet of media. Likewise, I’m pretty sure Stardew Valley is a work that grows baroque and long enough that several of my real life friends study it like a holy text. I grew up on a farm, in close proximity to the wild beasts of burden (men with moustaches) and the animals they take care of. All of the farming, the giving gifts, usually struck me as a type of make-believe a little too quaint.
Almost like the universe has decided to rip me out of the soil before the season just to remind me how to grow. I found myself repeatedly coming back to the ways Harvestella examines the plot beats of Nier and decides instead to turn them into something with resolution where happiness isn’t so much inevitable as something that desires constant working towards. Here I am in real life surrounded by strangers I keep trying to give too much of myself to, when they haven’t asked yet. It’s funny sometimes how videogames keep coming back to make me examine my own life: maybe it’s not time to throw all of this out just yet.
You Can Play Harvestella On A Variety Of Consoles.