Hold a boarded-up farmhouse against the dead, one round at a time. Every hit pays: buy guns off the walls, open up the house, the barn and the windmill field, roll the Hope Chest and find the breaker in the cellar.
Harrowfield is a first-person survival game by Blendi Bylygbashi, set on one farm on one long night. The whole farm is built and lit like a handmade stop-motion set: stitched, knitted and hand-painted things under baked light, and the dead move with the stutter of stop-motion.
You start in the living room of a boarded-up farmhouse with a pistol and 500 points. The dead come at Harrow Farm in rounds that never stop getting worse. They tear the boards off the windows and climb in. Every bullet that lands earns points, headshots pay more, and kills pay most. Hold E at a window to nail the boards back up.
Spend the points to open the farm, one door at a time. In the house: the kitchen, the hall and the bedroom off it, the garage and the cellar under it, then the stairs up to three more bedrooms, the sewing room and an attic full of dolls. The front door lets you out into the yard, with its well and porch, the cornfield edge and the road. Gates from there lead to the barn and its hayloft to the west, and to the windmill, the chicken coop and the pumpkin patch to the east. Every door you open is also a way in for them.
Buy chalk-outlined guns off the walls, or roll the Hope Chest, which gives a random weapon from the farm's stranger stock and sometimes moves to another part of the farm.
The breaker is in the cellar. Throw it and the lights come back on room by room, and three tonic cabinets wake up: Hair Trigger in the hall for a faster trigger, Iron Gut in the barn for more health, and Quick Hands in the windmill field for faster reloads and rebuilds. Second Wind, in the kitchen, needs no power. It gets you back up once when you go down, and it leaves after three drinks. Dead zombies sometimes drop power-ups: One Shot, Double Bounty, Full Belt, Batten Down and Shockwave.
Round one is a handful of shamblers. By round eight most of them are sprinting, and the music is no longer on your side. When you fall, the game remembers the furthest round you reached.
The house is not quite right. The kitchen clock has no hands. The grandfather clock in the hall gets taller as the rounds go on. A small papered door in the hall wall starts to show light from round four, and it does not open. At the edge of the corn behind the house stands a very tall woman in a bonnet. Look at her for long enough and she turns to look back. She only watches.
Controls: WASD move, mouse aim, left mouse fire, right mouse aim down sights, R reload, E buy, hold E rebuild a window or throw the breaker, V or middle mouse knife, G grenade, Q or mouse wheel swap, Shift sprint, C crouch, Space jump, M mute, Esc pause. Controllers (standard mapping): RT fire, LT aim, X reload and interact, Y swap, RB or R3 knife, LB grenade, L3 sprint, A jump, B crouch, Start pause.
