Monster Harvest (2021) [Switch]

And context, as we’ve said before, determines the meaning of things.

-Noam Shpancer, The Good Psychologist

If you’re a fan of Harvest Moon, aka Story of Seasons, or Rune Factory, Farming Simulator, Summer In Mara, My Time At Portia, FarmVille, Slime Rancher, Yonder, Farm Together, Littlewood, Kitaria Fables, Atomicrops, Forager, not to mention the hundreds of simpler knock offs scrambling to hope on board that sweet Stardew Valley gravy train. And no, I didn’t mention all those titles for the sake of SEO or to get you to click on the links (though you’re welcome to plz!) but because it’s necessary to view Monster Harvest through this context.

At first glance, it’s got something new to say about a (sub)genre that’s become absolutely derivative in the indie sphere, what I like to call pixel farming or pfarming. Patent pending. In Monster Harvest, you take your inherited plot of agricultural heaven and raise mutant vegetables to amass a fortune-slash-your-own-private-army. There’s a bigger emphasis on science than nature here, with the briefest of mentions about leaving the rat race before joining your uncle, the scientist, in becoming a QA tester for his empire.

With the plant-animals you harvest and raise, dubbed planimals, a new world opens up to you beyond farming. Different species of plant can be turned into different kinds of companions in three categories: party members, rideable mounts, or livestock. You can explore dungeons with party member planimals and even fight 1-on-1 battles against enemies with them. Simplistic RPG mechanics come to the fore. There’s also a feature for battling other villagers, though I’ll resist making a Pokemon reference here.

Except, it turns out, those ideas aren’t all that new either. Slime Rancher and Atomicrops alone seem to rise in answer to that accusation. Does a game need to have new ideas in order to be worth your time?

No. Not at all.

Who wouldn’t want more of a good thing? The problem, though, here is execution. I can’t think of much in Monster Harvest that hasn’t already been done elsewhere more functionally, reliably, practically, conveniently, or just plain better. This makes Monster Harvest stand out amongst its peers but in the wrong way completely.

Here’s a brief list of the issues I ran into in the 18 or 19 in-game days that I played Monster Harvest:

• Unresponsive buttons: had to press a button many times to get some actions to register, tested on multiple controllers.
• A lack of convenience features present in other games of the sort: being able to sift through items in my entire inventory without having to open the menu, being able to sort that inventory easily, etc.
• Illegibility: the game has some visual issues like off-putting or downright ugly characters and menus, although its environments really stand out, but I couldn’t read the game’s scaled font for item descriptions on my 70″ TV.
• My disappearing mount…

That last one was actually the straw that broke the proverbial planimal’s back. It was when I decided I’d had enough. I saved up to build a stable, gathered the necessary resources to build that stable, and then saved up again to purchase a blue Super Slime to convert a plant into a planimal mount. I watered and tended to it for a few days until it was ready. I couldn’t wait for a faster mode of transportation, no longer needing to rely on my avatar’s walking speed and awkward leaping dash.

Except when I got that mount, and managed to mash the button enough times to dismount, it disappeared whenever I entered a building and came back out. The thing I spent most of my gaming time planning for was actually pretty much useless. I tested it out four times in different buildings at different times of day. Of course, I thought that maybe I should test it out with a new mount from a new planimal species on different buildings in different areas before I realized… it’s not my job to playtest this game. That should’ve been somebody else’s job.

My job is to supply a dispassionate, impartial, informative, honest critique of the game as a product with an intended purpose, “to be playable”, while attempting to sort out the distinction between what is subjective and what is objective. And I’ll tell you, it’s objectively busted that the mount disappears and the game wipes the data from my stable after entering a single building.

In a year or more, Monster Harvest may be a good game. It may even become a great game! I hope it does. But as it stands now, it seems like the game wasn’t quite ready yet. And I didn’t even experience any issues with saving like players on Steam did.

We might brush it under the rug and suggest that it’s okay for Monster Harvest to launch essentially broken or unfinished, whatever you want to call it, because big AAA games do that and because Maple Powered Games is a small indie dev team. I’ll respond to that that it’s not great if any game launches this unpolished, whether big or small, and at this point in history, we already have a wealth of games by very small indie dev teams, sometimes by a single person, which turn out just fine or at least more playable. And further, Monster Harvest already had many excellent games in its category to echo properly.

So, monster-collection action RPG, I wish you the best and pray you see a brighter future ahead of you. May you become the game you wanted to be someday.

BROKEN PIXEL

Not recommended

Thank you to Merge Games and Maple Powered Games for supplying us with a copy of this title for review.

Red formerly ran The Well-Red Mage and now serves The Pixels as founder, writer, editor, and podcaster. He has undertaken a seemingly endless crusade to talk about the games themselves in the midst of a culture obsessed with the latest controversy, scandal, and news cycle about harassment, toxicity, and negativity. Pick out his feathered cap on Twitter @thewellredmage or Mage Cast.