The year is 1996, and video games are turning the children into serial killers, Satanists, and sexual deviants. Enter Harvester, an obscure FMV title developed by DigiFX, which joins a long list of defunct adventure game studios from the 90s. Play as Steve Mason, an amnesiac teenager who wakes up in Harvest, Texas, in 1953. You always were a kidder, Steve, says his parents, fiancée, and everyone else in town when he tells them he’s lost his memory and has no clue where he is. Searching for answers, your goal is to enter the Lodge, a massive cathedral-like building, and headquarters of a cult who controls the town, The Order of the Harvest Moon.

Harvester delights in moral panic, proudly and half-jokingly claiming its story to be a “graphically violent experience in terror” and “destined to be one of the most challenging and disturbing adventures ever produced” in advertisements. The game is a parade of exploding heads and splatter-gore, as Steve and the residents of Harvest suffer a series of brutal deaths, depending on the player’s choices. It spares no one, as nearly every character in the game is optionally murder-able – pregnant women, children, and the elderly are all fair game. These kill-scenes were filmed on a green-screen sound stage and composited into the game, giving it an uncanny charm as its characters burst into red goo. Harvest, Texas is every parent’s worst nightmare, a seemingly perfect, conservative town infested with filth. You’ll encounter gay firefighters, teachers banging in broom closets, a sadomasochist father, a mother who’s secretly a dominatrix and will shoot you in the head, and worst of all: sex before marriage. The game is a clever satire that tries as hard as it can to be the sensationalized Violent Video Game That’s Corrupting The Youth – its creator was reportedly upset when it didn’t appear on a US Senator’s annual report card warning parents of extreme violence in computer games.

I’ve loved adventure games since I was a little kid, much in part to the goofy humor that’s typical of the genre. Harvester is hysterical, and its violence works less to shock you than it does to make you laugh at its absurdity. It works even better in 2025, the thought that anyone clutched their pearls over a game this stupid is doubly hilarious.