Edna and Harvey: Harvey's New Eyes

Second verse...not quite the same as the first

I think there is a certain elemental difficulty about enjoying a sequel or a reimagining or remake of something I really love. There are experiences that I know going into that no matter how well done they are, I will be unable to enjoy them without endlessly comparing them to the original and it coming up short.

Edna and Harvey, Harvey’s New Eyes is one of those.

I loved the original. It charmed me. It moved me. It was endlessly entertaining. To go from that flawed masterpiece to its sequel was going to be hard on me and I knew it. The only way they could have won me over completely would be if they took everything I loved from the original and then did more of it, only better. Sadly, that is not the case here.

They didn’t even try to do that, really.

I knew this. I knew it going into the game that it wasn’t going to be like the first one. The near endless custom dialogue from interacting with anything and everything within the game environment must have taken a monumental amount of work to do the first time around. There was almost no chance in hell that they were going to do that again. Having four different commands for the player to interact with things? Way too clunky. No more of that either.

Well, what about Edna and Harvey?  They are the title characters, so they should be the stars of this game, right?

WRONG.

I could have forgiven them the other things, but not that.

So, what we have in Harvey’s New Eyes is a standard point and click adventure experience. You get a stock dialogue variation of ‘that doesn’t work’ when you attempt to combine things that don’t make sense in your inventory. You talk to people by left clicking and examine things by right clicking, which felt awfully limited when I went to that from the original game. It’s standard gameplay for the point and click adventure genre, so it’s not really something I should complain about, but I am.

It amuses me that people who play this game before they play the original, The Breakout, seem to like the sequel better, whereas I, who played the original first, feel rather let down by the sequel. Just one of those chicken/egg things I guess.

Now I am going to try, really really hard, to review this game on its own merits without comparing it too much to the original game.

*DEEP BREATH *

Here goes.

Alright, so HNE is a game that seems to be overly impressed by its own cleverness. The central gimmick is that instead of having the main character of the game actually talk, a disembodied voice narrates everything, as if we were being read a story. The Narrator is smooth voiced and pleasant and he narrates in such a way as to make him very enjoyable to listen to most of the time.

The main problem with this setup is that we are being told everything. It gets a little old as the game goes on. Oh and it basically prevents the main character from voicing an opinion on anything, since the Narrator is doing it for them.

That of course, leads me to introduce Lilli, the girl with no personality. She’s an adorable, sweet little serial kille—ah I mean accident prone, walking disast—no wait....

*Ahem*

Lilli is a cute little girl with a pink ribbon in her hair who is simply too shy to say anything to anyone. Whenever she attempts to talk, she is rudely interrupted by whoever she is talking to, which is another thing that’s rather amusing at first and then get’s really irritating after a while. People are jerks to her and they never let her talk.

She is also a walking doormat who does absolutely anything and everything that anyone tells her. Oh and you shouldn’t trust her around power tools, or ants...or bees...or unexploded world war two ordinance or...goodness, the list of things you shouldn’t trust Lilli with is longer than the list of things you that you can.

I think I was playing for less than ten minutes before I accidentally murdered someone. I would consider this a spoiler, but it happens so early on and if you look at the trailers, it kind of gives it away.

Now, bear in mind that Lilli is psychotic. She clearly hears the voice of the Narrator, when no one else can. She sees things that aren’t there and hears other scary voices coming from inanimate objects in a way that is less amusing than terrifying when I think about it. She has several psychotic episodes during the game, including visits to some other bizarre dream world induced by drinking uh...stuff that puts her to sleep.

Other than hearing the Narrator, there are these potato people that she sees, painting over the results of her disastrous actions with bright pink goopy paint. She sees no blood or bodies, but the gunky pink covered shapes are rather disturbing, to be honest. Not that she does anything deliberately to anyone, mind, but she is literally incapable of connecting cause to effect, when the effect ends up harming someone else. If you couple that with her propensity to do whatever she’s told, you get a character that is actually quite horrifying.

Tell Lilli to do something and she’ll do it, no matter what or who happens to be in her way or how many terrible accidental fatalities she unwittingly causes due to not being able to see the consequences of her actions.

This is played for laughs, by the way.

The carnage in the first part of the game is truly wince worthy. It’s made all the worse by the fact that most of the deaths are other children. Act one is set in an orphanage or nunnery or some kind of religious boarding school or something. I was never too clear on that. I did however, almost quit playing when my actions inadvertently drove another girl to hang herself. This game is not for the faint of heart.

Lilli’s reign of destruction is nearly absolute. By the time you finish the first act, you’ve had a hand in accidentally killing almost all of the other children and even a few adults. The whole time she’s humming along, trying to do the chores assigned her by the ridiculously unpleasant head nun, Mother Superior, and by Lilli’s only friend at the orphanage.

I wanted to reach through the screen, take Lilli by the shoulders, start shaking her, and plead with her to stop killing people.

This is all done in a cartoonish fashion and all of the carnage is censored by the potato people. Lilli is cheerfully oblivious, paying no mind as to why the other kids seem to be vanishing from her sight one by one.

Her perception is badly skewed, but mine isn’t.

I guess we’re supposed to find all of this funny and there were a few genuinely entertaining moments. I especially liked the part where I accidentally squashed a clown with a large hanging chandelier.

Yeah I don’t like clowns.

The Narrator is pretty amusing too, but...I don’t like Lilli.

She’s not a relatable character. She is in fact, a nonperson and a terrifying one at that. She’ll kill you without even noticing. If you see her coming, you should probably just run. Remember those horror movies about that kid who was maybe the antichrist? Yeah, he’s got jack all on Lilli.

Most point and click adventure games are narrated by the main character. This allows the player to get their thoughts on anything and everything they encounter and establishes a tangible connection between us and them. I can hear what they’re thinking and come to understand them as the game progresses.

Instead, we hear what the Narrator tells us that Lilli is thinking and we have to infer her reaction to it based on the noises and faces she makes when she interacts with stuff. Since she’s completely crazypants, who knows how accurate any of it is?

I should state, for the record, that I’m very confused by act one. I felt like I was playing a cartoonish serial killer simulator with all of the violence occurring off screen and all the bodies painted over in pink goo. Lilli and I were hapless patsies, somehow directly responsible for wiping out almost every living person at the boarding school. I even began to get seriously angry with the adults there.

Why are you giving Lilli power tools? Don’t you maniacs understand what she’s capable of?? What the HELL is wrong with you people?

Okay, deep breath. Calm down.

All of that stuff? All of those things I just told you about act one? They might never have actually happened at all.

This game makes my head hurt.

Consider this, if even one dead child was found on the grounds, the police would have been called, which they never were. If Lilli had actually gone on this unwitting rampage there would have been paramedics and ambulances and media and crowds...but nope.

In fact, it gets worse.

There is at least one instance that I can recall where one of the adults walked into the same room as one of the dead people, but she didn’t show any sort of reaction at all and gave no indication that there was somebody who...y’know was dead in there.

The more I think about it, the less sense this all makes. If there were dead bodies all over the place, they should have been noticed long before the end of act one. There would have been a panic or something.

Instead we get...freaking Dr. Marcel????

The only real holdover from the previous game, Dr. Marcel introduces a truly villainous antagonist, other than the horribly unpleasant Mother Superior who bosses Lilli around up to this point, that is. He and his asylum goons take over the school and capture Lilli, putting an end to her awful shenanigans.

I was actually somewhat glad to see that old bastard. It meant that Edna hadn’t killed him at the end of the last game, though she did put him into a wheelchair when she knocked him down the stairs, and it invalidated the horrible alternative ending. Unfortunately, Dr. Marcel has upgraded from Machiavellian revenge schemes and memory wiping, to what basically amounts to comic book supervillainy.

You see, he believes he has the perfect method to control children and stop potentially harmful and destructive behavior, not only in the extreme cases like Lilli, but for all of them. That’s right, Dr. Marcel now wants to rule the world—er I mean, control all of your children.

How does he plan on doing this?

*sigh*

Through Harvey.

Why he would choose the symbol of defiance from his greatest failure as the lynchpin upon which to rule them all, I really don’t know, but it gave Daedelic an excuse to put Harvey’s name on the game, so there’s that I suppose.

Dr. Marcel uses the stuffed blue bunny and his new, glowing red eyes to hypnotize Lilli. He gives her several commands, which restrict her behavior and prevent her from doing things that will inadvertently cause mayhem, death, and destruction.

Wait a minute....

He wants to stop Lilli from killing people...and he’s the villain??

I don’t...what is...AAAAAAAGGGHH!

So, from this point onward, the game undergoes an abrupt paradigm shift. Lilli becomes the plucky heroine, attempting to shake the control of the evil Dr. Marcel and his army of Harvey demons who forbid her from doing things that she needs to do in order for her to save her only friend from his terrible clutches.

Never again does she cause the kind of mayhem seen in act one. No more bodies pile up as a consequence of your actions, well, except the Harvey demons I guess. You have to defeat them one by one to progress, which is actually pretty entertaining and it’s such a sharp contrast to the first part of the game that I was left shaking my head in bewilderment.

I...I’m playing the good guy now? When did this happen?

The thing about the Harvey demons is that they look and sound nothing like Harvey. I kept waiting for a Lilli/Harvey team up and the subsequent ultimate destruction that that might cause, but alas I was disappointed.

It’s almost as if the devs had ideas for two different games. One, a horrible fatal accident simulator with a clueless, innocent protagonist. And two, the sequel to the first Edna and Harvey game. Then they combined the two and the results just feel disingenuous to me.

Finally, the game has Lilli come to the realization of the results of her actions in the first act and then it moves as quickly as it possibly can away from it. This is aided by Lilli not being able to voice an opinion on it, though she does run away screaming from the revelation. Look, if you want a scene to have actual impact, you need to have it last longer than maybe, five seconds? It’s like they hurriedly wanted to sweep the whole mess under the rug and finish up the story they’re actually telling.

Yeah yeah, that all happened but it’s unimportant. Now look at this over here! Isn’t this thing neat?

Oh and the Narrator, who by this point was starting to really grate on my nerves, makes some comment about Lilli and her reaction and then slyly points out that ‘who really knows what little girls are actually thinking?’ As if he hasn’t spent the ENTIRE GAME, telling us exactly what he thinks Lilli is thinking up to this point.

And that right there is the main reason I don’t like this game nearly as much as the first one. In fact, I probably won’t play it again anytime soon. Have you ever been in a situation where someone really thinks they’re being clever and witty and maybe they actually are, but their attitude is just smug and superior about it? That’s kind of how this game feels to me.

It feels like the game is constantly laughing at its own jokes and nudging me with an elbow over and over again. Hey, aren’t we clever? Bet you weren’t expecting this.

Stop nudging me.

No seriously, knock it off.

Come on dude, getting a little tired of your shit.

Enough with the snide commentary on everything. Why do people like you so much?

Hahah Narrator. You so funny. Oh hahah...hah....ha.....*crickets chirping*

Am I the only one who doesn’t like this? See, this is why most games of this type are told and narrated from the viewpoint of the main character. I think the last time I played a game where every action I did was narrated by an omnipresent invisible voice was a Winnie the Pooh game from my childhood.

Winnie the Pooh.

Just let that sink in for a little bit.

The Narrator is a gimmick and Lilli’s inability to say anything without everyone interrupting her is a running gag. The problem with gimmicks and running gags is that they can get really old, really quickly.

I was honestly expecting better.

I...rrrgh.

This is not a bad game. This is in fact a pretty good point and click adventure game. It’s got a wicked, warped sense of humor and plenty of very entertaining, laugh out loud moments. I particularly enjoyed the D&D segment late game, wherein the DM of the game ousted the Narrator and started narrating things himself.

The music and voice acting are also very good, as are the artwork and animations.

But this is not an Edna and Harvey game. If they had called it Lilli’s Terrible Adventures or something along those lines, it would have been much more honest. The two games are only tangentially connected to one another.

The Breakout has far more technical problems than HNE and it really deserves someone going back and fixing them. Edna and Harvey are wonderful characters and it would have been really great to see them again in an actual sequel, starring the both of them, but that simply isn’t the case here.

Harvey’s New Eyes has one scene with original Harvey, amounting to a sort of cameo appearance in a game with his name on it. Edna is...well, I can’t really say. It is very hard not to come away with the impression that someone has pulled a bait and switch on me.

For their part, fans who have come to the original after playing the sequel, seem terribly confused. There’s no omnipresent Narrator, no gimmicky stuff going on, no running gags, and no Lilli. The two feel like completely separate, completely different types of games, even though they exist within the same genre.

I however? I loved the first and only Edna and Harvey game. This one bears the name, but it really isn’t a sequel of any sort, though it was entertaining to confront the villainous Dr. Marcel once again at the end of the game.

I like this game, but I do not love it and I find it occasionally very very irritating.

I spent over twenty five hours with the original, which is an astonishing length of time for a point and click adventure game you can probably beat in just a few hours if you rushed straight through it. I laughed and I cried and it helped me through a very rough period in my life. The story and the characters stuck with me for a long time after I completed it, which is all any storyteller can really ask of their audience.

By contrast, I spent about twelve hours with this one. I’m pretty sure it’s a longer game too, but it is more limited in scope and ideals, and the original, for all its many flaws, transcends the medium and almost becomes art.

Harvey’s New Eyes is not art.

It’s an amusing game, but I cannot help but compare it to the original and the original has so much heart I can’t help but love it, whereas this one seems like someone’s really twisted joke. It might be funny and shocking, but I don’t really like it all that much.

I have no idea whether to recommend it or not, so I’ll leave you with my observations and opinions and you can take a look at the game and decide for yourself.