Harvest Festival 64: A Horrific Love Letter to Animal Crossing

Since its initial release on the Nintendo 64, the Animal Crossing series has been critically revered for its casual gameplay and cute characters. The brand has become so ingrained that, when you think about Animal Crossing, certain friendly animal villagers and cheery tunes may immediately pop into your mind. With this reputation as a cheery and happy world, there has also been an eeriness lurking in the shadows. Sure, owning a house and having animal friends is nice, but being saddled with debt and harassed by an angry mole doesn’t exactly match that peaceful image that the game initially presents. With all these existing off-putting elements in the initial game, it only makes sense that an indie developer would attempt to create a horror version of Animal Crossing, and Harvest Festival 64 is just that.

Created in 72 hours for the 52nd Ludum Dare Game Jam, Harvest Festival 64 is a short Animal Crossing-inspired game that combines cutesy aesthetics with a horrific climax. The player controls an anthropomorphic cat who is new to a village inhabited by other anthropomorphic cats. In preparation for their Harvest Festival (which just so happens to fall on Friday the 13th), the cats task the player with gathering materials to help prepare for the upcoming festival. The controls are a basic WASD scheme, and the gameplay is easy to pick up. You simply follow the villagers’ requests and collect the materials.

The story and gameplay are simple, but the execution is quite effective due to its parallels to the source material. At its essence, Animal Crossing mostly consists of socializing with villagers and collecting items. Harvest Festival 64 combines both of those elements into an unsettling experience. The graphics and music are spot-on as both feel like proper tributes to its main inspiration. The “animalese” that the characters speak is also reminiscent of the Animal Crossing sound effects, but it’s slightly more grating, which is perfect for creating a tense atmosphere.

All of the collecting and socializing climaxes with an occult animal sacrifice at the Harvest Festival itself. Although it’s a horror game, most of the horror only occurs in this climactic sequence as the world begins to glitch out and the game concludes by crashing. This kind of works to the game’s advantage due to the aforementioned eeriness that exists naturally in the world of Animal Crossing. Even in its cheerier moments of upbeat music and cutesy visuals, we know something darker is lurking beneath the surface. Just that knowledge effectively builds a unique natural tension that is very rare in modern horror games.

The game is only about fifteen minutes long, but even though it acts as more of a demo than a fleshed-out game, it’s still an effective example of inspired horror gameplay. The indie horror scene for turning nostalgic Nintendo titles into terrifying gaming experiences isn’t massive, but it’s very spirited. Titles like Kitty Kart 64 and Harvest Festival 64 work so well because the developers of these games were so clearly huge fans of the source material. The fact that such unique horror gaming experiences are still being inspired by games like Animal Crossing is a testament to both the lasting impact of the source material and the ingenuity of indie developers. Neither deserves more credit than the other, and that’s what makes games like Harvest Festival 64 such a pleasant surprise.