Exploring the Cornfields: A Unique Hide and Seek Game with Grandma

After a name change and a 10-month postponement, Harvest Hunt is still scheduled for May 22. To put it simply, it's a game of hide and seek in the fields with an unfriendly monster, in a rogue-lite style. We unlock new tools and improvements with each run, and modifiers determined at random will facilitate, or disrupt, our harvest. Oh, and it's boring as rain.

Test carried out on a version provided by the publisher.

We liked the screenshots

Harvest Hunt tells us the story of a cursed village whose fields are haunted at night by a creature called the Devourer. At first glance, one might say that if the thing in question only roams the fields at night, we don't really care. But, since obviously there is a but, it is at night that it is possible to harvestAmbrosia, an apparently very important plant species. The game fills us with lore through texts that we unlock after each run. Initially, it pretty much works to arouse our curiosity, as does the cel-shaded artistic direction. The atmosphere is dark and heavy, with pretty lighting effects. Unfortunately, we quickly realize that this is the most successful part of Harvest Hunt. After ten minutes, the poverty of the gameplay becomes much more terrifying than the scarecrow that chases us.

Harvest Hunt Narration — The narration is presented in the form of writings from former inhabitants of the village that our character attempts to reconstruct, because the player would be too stupid to do it alone.

But where is the combine?!

The structure of the game is basically classic for a rogue-lite: you spawn on a map, you pick up randomly distributed things, and you unlock new bonuses and utilities. The particularity of Harvest Hunt is that it's primarily a stealth game, with some lousy combat. Well… infiltration isn't of much interest either. The developers tell us to play the way we want. This translates into the fact that you can wander around the only map available to collectAmbrosia and leave when we want, or give it to ourselves with the Devour and try to ban him for even moreAmbrosia.

Harvest Hunt Random — The randomness for bonuses/penalties is not always very consistent. The fiends are traps that the monster uses to spot us, and there, they should make us lose our hearing and our health, except that there won't be any at all…

And the problem is that we're bored! We're moving two per hour, and the sprint is more like a sprint. fast walk than a race. At least this asthmatic pseudo-sprint on crutches allows us to go fast enough so that the monster doesn't catch up with us. However, getting rid of the Devour during a run is very painful, and not very stimulating. In fact, you have to damage it three times for it to drop an effigy, which must then be brought to a specific location. To do this, we can use forks scattered here and there, or tools that we can buy with our life points between runs. The most useful being throwing axes which allow you to bring down an effigy with a single blow. The fork is particularly frustrating because of its reach of around twenty centimeters. This means that, when we want to strike, we have less than a half chance of waiting for our target before the creature catches us. And if we get fooled, we have to hammer the mouse clicks until the monster stops shouting at us and deigns to leave. On the other hand, if you touch it right away, you can immobilize it and hit it three times in a row so that it drops the item you need. And, I repeat, but you have to do this three times to ban him. It's extremely boring. We have more fun watching the grass grow, without anyone trying to yell in our ears.

Another game to stream?

While the concept of a rogue-lite hide-and-seek game could have been interesting, the terribly boring and repetitive gameplay ofHarvest Hunt in fact a game that can be played around in thirty minutes. The infiltration mechanics are simplistic, the confrontation phases with our pursuer are sluggish and frustrating, and we quickly no longer want to follow the narrative because in the end, we don't care. It's hard to understand who might be interested in Harvest Huntexcept perhaps YouTubers overplaying the slightest scare.

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