Summary
I had a score to settle inHarvest Hunt, the survival horror game that sees you take on the role of the Warden of Luna Nova, surviving each season by collecting Ambrosia and either eluding or defeating the Devourer.When I played it at WASD, I was defeated by the Devourermere moments away from being able to banish it and this left me determined to get my revenge. At launch, I managed to get as far as the third season (there are five total) before realising I was scuppered.
You must earn a specific amount of Ambrosia over five nights each season to proceed to the next. I’m not a pro at horror games, so when given the option to fight the Devourer and banish it for Ambrosia or just sneak around gathering Ambrosia from the land instead, I absolutely chose the latter.
My plan seemed all the more foolproof when I realised that after Season One, banishing the Devourer requires collecting three fragments, not one as the tutorial forgivingly showed us. You have to attack the Devourer to get each fragment, which means you have to head into battle at least three times. Each time you get chomped again and lose more Vigor, so you’re left scrambling looking for rations to recover your health bar. It’s a lot.
After a run of particularly bad luck, including drawing the card that meant entering the crop fields — the safest place you may be from the Devourer — caused constant damage and twice getting the card that yielded zero Ambrosia, I practically gave up.
A new playthrough could offer more favourable cards, but I didn’t want to just rely on better luck. So I did the natural thing and roped in my family to help. We started back at the beginning, mainly because the game’s tutorial was a better way of teaching my husband the basics than me trying to explain it, but also because I’d already screwed myself on my first save file with a lack of crucial Ambrosia. After roping in my husband and son (the latter of whom was more of a cheerleader), this single-player horror game became a team-based challenge for survival.
My husband had a very different playstyle to me, often staying in complete darkness without the lantern. It meant the Devourer saw him less, but his vision was impaired. To improve this as best we could, we played in complete darkness, all three of us sat huddled in a dark room watching the same screen while our cats wondered what we were shouting about.
We also favoured different Warden Strength and Village Fortification cards in our deck and approached tools differently. While I was a bit more stingy with spending my Vigor on tools as it meant starting each night with a lower health bar (and why get tools when I don’t intend to attack the Devourer?), my husband was more likely to stack them up at landmarks and run to replenish his health at the start of an evening. He was also far more amenable to tackling the Devourer, but only if the cards were in his favour and necessitated fewer fragments for banishes, or the cards reallyweren’tin his favour and failing to banish would drastically penalise us.
Our main strategy remained the same: just get Ambrosia. To give a little more context, there may be around 130 Ambrosia to collect on your average night and you’ll have a set target of Ambrosia to collect per season, starting at 200 and increasing by 40 each season. That might sound easy, but Ambrosia is scattered and hidden all over the world, and the Devourer will contaminate any it finds. Your luck with cards might mean surviving is all the more difficult, so you don’t have the luxury of being able to explore to the fullest to get all the Ambrosia. There might benoAmbrosia (though sometimes you’ll get the positive card that yields more). Oh and don’t forget, you must survive the Devourer this entire time. If it kills you on any given night, any Ambrosia you’d collected that evening is lost.
We had to weigh up whether it was worth risking staying out in the fields, and sometimes we had to leave a lot of Ambrosia behind because the cards were stacked against us. It became a joke based on The Weakest Link where we’d shout ‘bank’ to end the night and ensure we kept all the Ambrosia we’d gathered. But we couldn’t just get enough for the season’s requirement. We had to factor in possible penalty cards for failing to banish on subsequent nights, so we aimed to be at least 80 Ambrosia over each season just in case.
We strategised about which cards to keep, though we didn’t always agree. Our go-to favorites included the card that grants healing while crouching - we were crouching all the time to help avoid the Devourer, so a constant regen helped massively. Our other favourite card repurposes rations into Ambrosia if your Vigor is full. Each bowl gave 30 Ambrosia, more if you had the card that doubled rations. One night when the cards were in our favour, we managed to get over 200 Ambrosia in one go because of this. In our final season, victory felt so close yet all the more precarious. Any night could result in the worst draw of cards and we had to be prepared for it. By the third night, we’d hit enough Ambrosia but we gathered 160 more just in casebothof the remaining nights resulted in penalty cards. They didn’t, thankfully, but at least we were ready.
Finishing Harvest Hunt was such a sweet feeling, not only because I finally conquered the Devourer, but because it was all the more fun playing together. I have absolutely no chill, so when my husband was playing, he was plagued by me constantly jumping with fright and shouting, “There it is!”. Sorry, not sorry. My son found it just as fun watching us play the game together as he did watching the actual gameplay, as we bickered over cards, cheered in triumph together, and panicked as we fled the Devourer. Maybe horror games can be family-friendly after all?
