Gleaner Heights: You spilled your Twin Peaks in my Harvest Moon

[Bjorn]

 

Jonesing for more Harvest Moon style farming games after binging on Stardew Valley again, I stumbled across a rough little treasure called Gleaner Heights.  It is "inspired" by Twin Peaks in much the same way that Deadly Premonition was, as in, it just rips off some Twin Peaks things whole cloth and runs with them.  Including a rather faithful rendition of the RR diner seen above.  The Twin Peaks content extends to having a hotel on top of a waterfall run by slightly weird duck with an attractive daughter, with a resident FBI agent living at the hotel investigating the mysterious death of a local teenager.  There's an abusive drug dealer named "Lee".  A good natured sheriff. 

 

And I love everything about this.  I wish that people inspired by TP would show some more creativity in their work rather than just repeating the structure of TP, but still, I'll take it.  I love the structure of the small town, with an outsider who slowly peels back the layers to discover the dark and rotten core of what otherwise looks like an idyllic community. 

 

My knowledge of HM style farming games is mostly limited Stardew, but from Jenna and a few others in slack, it sounds like this is much more in the SNES era version of farming games.  Even with the Twin Peaks wrapping, you've got what seems to be a solid farming game.  You're an outsider who's recently bought a run down farm and need to clear its fields, fix the barns, plant seeds, buy chickens, befriend townsfolk and do something fishing and dipping into the mines after all the other day's chores are done. 

 

Long term, I think this can be a game that's more combat focused than these tend to be.  I know that there are actual boss monsters to find eventually.  The mines are significantly different than Stardew.  Time autopauses when you enter the mine, and you can't just use a ladder to instantly leave, you have to backtrack out of the mine, and each level you go up is randomly generated again, so a deep dive into it has some risk and time when ascending (not sure I'm a fan of this, but it's an interesting change). 

 

The game feels like it has a far, far, far more relaxed pace than Stardew.  Stardew often leaves me feeling rushed and pushed to get as much done as I want in a day.  With Gleaner, days are long enough that I can knock out all the things I want to do, and then still have time to just get some fishing in the evenings once the rest of the town folk have gone to bed.  There doesn't seem to be any penalty for going to bed late, so there's plenty of time to do foraging and fishing after nightfall. 

 

I'm digging the hell out of this so far, but I'm only on day 13 of spring.  It's definitely work picking up if weird takes on farming games is a thing that's up your alley. 

 

Oh, and pick of Agent Dale Cooper Deacon Troopel and Audrey Emily standing in the hotel lobby. 

 

[Bjorn]

Okay, so I more or less finished up the story in this tonight.  And did it before the end of Summer in Year 1.  The balance of this game might as well be non-existent.  I wasn't even trying to rush, if someone wanted to min-max a bunch, I'm pretty sure you could get every single upgrade available and see everything by this point (I know I missed some stuff and I had several building and tool upgrades not yet done). 

 

The atmosphere and expectations this game sets are great and for big twin peaks fans or people who just like farming games, it's worth checking out, but the story just kind of fizzles into a bit of an anti-climactic mess.

 

But there's something super duper weird near the end.  The game has a sin system, which ultimately affects the ending someone gets.  There are only 4 or 5 total chances to sin, and I didn't find them all.  But the last one I found was on the unsettling side because of how the dev decided what a sin was in this context.  Spoilering on the slight chance anyone might want to play this:

 

Spoiler

So the story in GH revolves around the mysterious death of a local teen girl.  You can find out that the Mayor of GH had been fucking her for awhile before her death and that the local hotel owner had proof of the affair, and was blackmailing the Mayor into funneling funds to the hotel owner.  You have proof of all of this.  It is a "sin" to tell anyone in town about the affair or the blackmail, including revealing the crime to the police.  The only non-sin options are to a) tell the hotel owner you know, in which case he bribes you to stay quiet or tell the Mayor, so he can destroy the evidence.  If you tell anyone else in town, the Mayor will commit suicide that night, which I guess is what makes it a sin.  But it's such a weird decision to say that revealing the crimes of the two richest and most powerful men in town, and at least one of them facing the consequences of their crimes, is a sin.