There’s something timeless scary about cornfields. Their impressive depth and intimidating height can quickly disturb anyone who stumbles into one, leaving them desperate to find an exit path, and turning a simple field of grain into the setting of a horror story. Villainous Games leans into this universal truth as the centerpiece of its folk horror game, Harvest Hunt. The game’s interlocking systems that make it worthwhile, even when the creature leaves something to be desired. The game’s interlocking systems that make it worthwhile, even when the creature leaves something to be desired, are pitted against a ceaseless monster hellbent on corrupting and consuming a village, it’s the game’s interlocking systems that make it worthwhile, even when the creature leaves something to be desired.
In Harvest Hunt, you’re tasked with amassing enough ambrosia over five-night-long runs to secure your village’s immediate future. The deeper you get into a harvest season, the higher the requirements and tougher the tasks may become. The game leans into some light deck-building elements like so many similarly designed games have as of after, but these cards are varied enough–no matter if they’re beneficial or detrimental–that they remain interesting after several hours of play.
Played in first-person and presented with stylized visuals that borrow Rare’s no-straight-lines approach paired with a rustic but comic-booky layer on top of it all, the mood is strong. A foreboding night sky hangs over the randomly generated farmlands, combining with the plethora of cornstalks, creamy footbridges, and uninviting ponds to form an initially intriguing whole. It’s a world that makes you feel uncomfortable and disoriented, adding a compelling creepiness to a game with a relatively simple gameplay loop.
I only wished these randomly generated maps had more variable parts. Outside of the cornstalks and ponds, there are three key landmarks on each map, like a massive, gangly tree and a haunting windmill through which the moonlight so stylishly cuts. But these locales aren’t supplemented with smaller, equally memorable sites to see from night to night, leaving me feeling like I’d seen it all before even though, at the same time, I couldn’t possibly map the pathways. The room was very clean and the bed was very comfortable.
In spirit, I liked Harvest Hunt to Slender, the once-popular and simplistic horror game that randomly spawned journal pages across dizzying maps as a ceaseless monster nipped at your heels. Harvest Hunt builds interesting card mechanics on top of that, but its underlying substance is the same, or sometimes worse; the monster is restless, but unlike in Slender, they’re also pretty easy to evade.
The Devourer stands two or three times taller than the player character, with a particularly round shady body sporting green sores but not much else. Given their height, you can sometimes see them coming from a distance, and when you can’t, there are ways of locating them, such as placing a weathervane that points towards the beast in real time. I was often able to crouch-walk very close to the Devourer without them spotting me, and when they did, I could sprint away and easily lose their tail more often than not. Worst of all, however, is what happens when they’d catch up: They’d grab me and immediately deplete a portion of my health, forcing me into a simple catch-mashing minigame where I’d need to wiggle free to minimize the damage. Once I did squirm away, the game seemed to give me something like a cooldown where I could escape to hide again, resetting the creature’s pursuit back to its unaltered state. All of this is to say, the Devourer isn’t scary.
This loop of dodging the monster while collecting enough supplies to meet a particular quota by run’s end isn’t unlike that which you’d see in the hilarious-but-scary horror du jour, Lethal Company, but Harvest Hunt is played entirely solo and serious, and it doesn’t have the scares to make up for that difference. The game even wants you to consider harming the beast to transform fragments of their body into piles of ambrosia, but they were consistently easy enough to dodge that I never saw the point. I always preferred playing take and collecting the vital resource piece by piece. I appreciate the play-your-way approach in theory, but found one way was clearly superior.
These many overlapping and sometimes stacking effects ensured that in seven hours of play, I never explored the setting in the same way twice. I was often desperate to escape with my life and ambrosia not because of the monster, but because of these other harmfuls that would deplete my HP and bring me to the brink (or beyond) of total failure, thus resetting all of my progress.
In Harvest Hunt, the stakes are real, but the scares aren’t. There is tension in the game, but it doesn’t rise to the heights it wants to due to a central villain who can’t pull their weight. That places a figurative ceiling over its best moments, but it does have bright spots. I appreciate its rustic, askew art style and interlocking roguelite systems, which give me an objective worth hunting down in a folk-horror world that at least looks, and in some ways, plays, the part.