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 on go 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.
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