Harvest

Harvest gives us laden orchards and barren fields; desperate fervour and doubts grown thick as weeds; calves born and pigs slaughtered; proud traditions, failing wealth, and hostile stares; juice-stained lips and dirt under nails; and always the questions echoing down through the generations: ‘Whose blood must be spilled to feed the land?’ and ‘Whose hand will hold the knife?’

In Harvest, you play the residents of a remote island community stranded somewhere off the British coast around the end of the eighteenth century. On the mainland, old traditions are fed into the engine of Empire—languages crushed and folkways flattened under the imperial heel. Trains chew through the countryside as industry marches grimly onwards. Yet here, separated from towering smokestacks by the fathomless sea, they survive unchanged.

The Island is a sheltered paradise, cradled by the churning waters and blessed with rich soil and perfect weather. Folk live simple and contented lives off the fat of the land—the sea offers up teeming nets, the orchards fill our baskets in abundance, and our fields produce record yields, year after year. Life is good. And here the old rituals and stories still endure, stubborn and hardy, as full of stark beauty as the twisted willow.

But this golden haven comes at a price—the Island hungers, and demands that its generosity be repaid. There must be death to pay for life—hot blood soaking into the thirsty black soil—and no-one can know until the time comes whose blood will feed the land, and whose hand will hold the knife.