Novembeard

I’ve never taken part in No-Shave November, but as the month is almost over, I thought a word related to the event might be fitting.

tonsorial adj. – Of, or relating to the business of a barber.

Learned from: Harvester (PC)

Developed by DigiFX Interactive

Published by Merit Studios (1996)

It’s tempting to describe Harvester as “like Twin Peaks, but…” yet I don’t think that’s fully accurate.  It’s set in a weird little town, filled with people who are all more than slightly off, true.  But whereas Twin Peaks had a certain undeniable charm, Harvester seemed dead-set on injecting the X-TREME nature of the ’90s into nearly every screen, and turning the dial up to 11.

Harvester is a point & click adventure game, which has you playing as a “teenager” (who’s clearly in his mid- to late-twenties), named Steve, who wakes up one morning in a town he doesn’t recognize, surrounded by people he doesn’t know.  His “mother” spends the entirety of her days baking sheet after sheet of cookies for an upcoming bake sale, his neighbor is a disgusting pig who only ever talks about meat, and the local mortician also owns a hotel, where random drifters seem to keep dying.  Oh, and Steve has also apparently traveled back to the 1950s, and is engaged to be married to a girl who also has no memory of how she got there.  And everyone is pushing Steve to join a mysterious group known only as The Lodge.

Sounds like an okay setup, right?  Well, it is, until you discover the local meat plant is killing random cats, the principal of the school is a pedophile, your “father” is tied to a bed in blood-smeared sex dungeon, the fire station is staffed by flamboyantly gay men who spend their time painting nude pictures…you get the idea.  I have a feeling DigiFX was simply trying to push the notoriety of Harvester as hard as they could, considering the panic around violent and objectionable video games that was rampant in the ’90s.  They certainly took things to extremes…but I have my doubts whether it helped their sales or not.

So, what does Harvester have to do with cutting hair?  Well, eventually you do get pushed into joining The Lodge, and the initiation requires you to perform a series of increasingly dangerous “pranks,” that range from scratching someone’s prized car, to setting a building on fire.  Along the way, you have to steal a barber pole from “Mr. Pastorelli’s tonsorial parlor,” I believe the shadowy Lodge member in the robe calls it–which seems like it would be one of the more harmless tasks, until the owner ends up getting electrocuted by the exposed wires when he opens the shop the next day.

Harvester is not a good game by any means, but there is a bit of tongue-in-cheek humor to be found in its laughably bad gore effects.  That’s kind of offset by the overall squicky nature of some of the other stuff (the father watching his own daughter get undressed every night comes to mind), but it’s pretty cheap on Steam, if you feel like checking it out.

The tonsorial parlor in question.