Playing one of Gamescom's strangest genre mashups in We Harvest Shadows: a farming simulator horror
Trying not to crop myself.
In 1986, a man called Christopher Knight drove his car into the wilderness until it ran out of gas and then he abandoned it. He walked into the woods and never looked back. Knight stayed in that Maine wilderness in America for 27 years, never uttering a word even to himself. "Hi" was apparently all he said upon encountering some hikers. It would get so cold in the wilderness he'd have to wake himself up and walk around to warm up, and sometimes, on the brink of death, he'd see a cloaked figure off to the side, smiling at him and beckoning him to come closer. He'd consider it, but he never did let himself go.
That story is shared by developer David Wehle (The First Tree, Game Dev Unlocked) in his new game We Harvest Shadows, which was announced as a "first-person farming horror allegory" during last night's Gamescom Opening Night Live showcase. It was one of the weirder games on show, for sure. It's made only by him and he shared the story of Knight because it's a large part of the game's inspiration. "I read the book about Christopher during a dark time in my life," Wehle writes in the game's developer note. "I kinda envied him in some ways." We Harvest Shadows, he says, is a game "borne of pure self-hatred and desperation". It's personal, it's dark, and it fascinates me.
I've never seen a farming sim welded to a horror game concept before. Typically farming games are systemic: you build stuff in order to earn more stuff, and go on until you have a great big successful farm. Here there's some of that - you plant crops and harvest things and sell things, in order to get better things - but the reward for doing so is story. You push towards milestones so you can find out more about what's going on - who you are, why you came here, what happened to you. But while you're doing that, strange things happen, which will make you very afraid of the dark.
Let's back up a bit. In the game you are Garrett, a man who's clearly had something traumatic happen in his life though you don't know what that is. You pick up his tale as misses a turning in a car and drives and drives, coming face to face with fate many miles later - a billboard advertising the sale of a nearby farm. Wanting to escape the human world, Garrett buys it, and this is where your farming story begins.
The place is a dump. You wake up in a dirty, dingy bedroom with a few pieces of furniture and rubbish strewn over the floor. Downstairs is no better - the house is borderline derelict. It's eerie and unsettling, but for the meantime you're preoccupied with cleaning it up and doing what you can to earn a living here, namely picking tomatoes and stacking them in a nearby trailer to automatically sell them. With the cash you earn, you can buy tools and seeds and all manner of useful things, by interacting with a build-book on a table outside.
During the day, it's idyllic. Sorting the property out (and indirectly, yourself) is wholesome work, and purposeful, and the house being in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by fields and trees, brings a pastoral sense of calm. But as the sun dips and the gentle piano accompaniment sours, uncertainty and foreboding creep in. You know, because this is a horror game, something is coming. You know because you've got a flashlight that struggles to illuminate more than a small circle, something will happen in the dark. You know because of the creepy painting on the wall, which changes when danger is close, that, um, danger is close. But what will it manifest as?
Animals howl and the old house creaks as you wait. A door slams as a window somehow opens. Upstairs, a wardrobe rattles and shakes. Your torch flickers and loses its potency. A locked door shudders and you hear voices behind it. There's always a sense something scary is near. Then, you sleep, and you wake in the morning with order seemingly, blissfully, restored, and you set about your chores again.
That's the general shape of the game: work through the day, crossing-off chores on your to-do list - buy a new axe, build a chicken coop - then when night comes, lock the door and wait until you can sleep it off again. But every so often there's an interruption and a further clue as to who Garrett is and what's going on. It's not clear, you see, whether the house and grounds are haunted at all, or whether it's in his head, and if it is, how and why it got this bad. There are clues: there was a woman in his life who clearly meant a lot to him, as did his father, who is the only person he has told he lives here, but that's as far as the clues go. Some of these are revealed through flashbacks, others through what appear to be hallucinations, and reaching certain milestones seems to trigger them - the closing section of the demo begins after you buy a rifle, for example.
As a solo-developed game, it's a bit janky in places. The few combat moments I experienced with wild dogs were basic, and as a farming simulation, it's relatively limited. I picked tomatoes and then planted some, making sure they were watered each night, and each morning I harvested eggs from the chickens I bought. I got a grass cutter to chop down the fields near me but didn't get to use it, and I only chopped down a few trees. There was an ATV of some kind parked in the grounds, but I didn't find what I needed to repair it. However, there's enough equipment in the build-book to suggest a fairly robust farming simulation, and there's talk of livestock and there are bigger barns beyond the house's immediate grounds that you can get to. The game also promises an endless mode for when the story is done, which means it must be confident enough that it can sustain players as a farming sim.
As a blend of genres, though, it's surprisingly effective. The daytime farming brings a tangible sense of relief from the nervy night, and it provides you with something to actually do, a focus, whereas the lingering memory of the night time laces what can sometimes be monotonous work with a sense of tension and unease. One side benefits the other, and linking it to generous story moments lends it a genuine sense of intrigue. You start with no information so you hunger for more. I'm impressed. I'm also relieved to find out it's only a short story at four-ish hours, which reassures me the game won't lean on farming grind to lengthen itself.
I haven't played anything like We Harvest Shadows before - something that meshes the systems of farming with the atmosphere of horror - and I think it's testament to how well the game handles it that I'm now wondering why that is. I also haven't experienced many games that are personal statements like this, either, where a developer has been vulnerable and opened up and let us into what sounds like a difficult time in their life. It's the sort of thing only a solo-developed game can do, and I applaud it. Spooky though it is, I'm eager to see more.