By speaking to various townspeople and clicking on special "hotspots", players can learn information and collect items that progress the game's story and play.

Exploring the town, Steve discovers Harvest is populated by hostile, strange individuals whom he likens to facsimiles or parodies of real people.

Steve visits the Sergeant at Arms at the Lodge, who tells him that all of his questions will be answered inside the building, and sets about giving him a series of tasks that serve as initiation rites.

On the final day of his initiation, Steve discovers a mutilated skull and spinal cord in Stephanie's bed, which the Sergeant at Arms tells him is his invitation to the Lodge.

Venturing inside, Steve discovers that the Lodge is composed of a series of rooms called "Temples" which serve as mordant burlesques of real civic locations (including a living room with a dead family and a kitchen where a chef prepares human meat) and whose inhabitants challenge him with a series of puzzles meant to teach lessons integral to understanding the precepts of the lodge.

Each "lesson" turns out to be an inversion of traditional morality, including the futility of charity, the uselessness of the elderly, and the benefits of lust and vanity.

At the highest level of the Lodge, the Sergeant at Arms presents a still-living Stephanie and explains that Harvest is an elaborate virtual reality simulator being operated by a group of scientists in the 1990s to determine if it is possible to turn average humans into serial killers.

Steve laughs as the camera enters his throat and stomach, revealing the dissolving body parts of the driver he killed earlier.

Writer-director Gilbert P. Austin recounted:My feeling was that FutureVision, being a small company, would need something "high concept" to compete with the industry giants of the time, and I argued that Harvester was exactly that idea.

[3] Austin finished the creative work in Autumn 1994 and moved on to other projects, leaving producer Lee Jacobson in sole charge of the remaining development.

"[13] GameSpot's review was mixed, as they felt that there was "nothing actually revolutionary going on in Harvester" but praised the game's full-motion video segments as "truly disturbing" and commented that it had "tried-and-true adventure mechanics with entertaining twists".

[14] Entertainment Weekly's Bob Strauss commented that "this gratuitously violent game doesn't make much sense, but it is a lot of twisted fun.

"[16] In 2018, Daniel Kurland of Bloody Disgusting published a retrospective review of the game, in which he wrote: "Harvester is so over the top in its violence, sex, and taboo impulses that it almost initially feels like a joke.

"[18] The game has been compared to the works of filmmaker David Lynch,[19] including the film Blue Velvet[16] and the television series Twin Peaks.