This browser game is a post-apocalyptic Glasto meets Wicker Man non-violent tech and it’s like hell

If you told me your weird 40-minute free idle game, I’d pay attention. I may not have a place to go or people to see, but I have a lot of work to do (like being required to watch a video on correct neutral chair posture at work). Then your browser game turns out to be a weird, post-apocalyptic sort of thing about music, dance, and weird country traditions – and harvest much corn – and I would sit crouched in a chair, enslaved like a little hedgehog drinking cider, for those 40 minutes.

I am such a creature Peter Talisman: Lord Of The Harvest, a game that fills your screen with a large, gently swaying cornfield.

You, click test, found that you could cut this corn, one by one, and eventually discovered a strange standing stone. When you touch it, it will play music. You are forced to keep cutting corn and finding more rocks.

This is the idle part of the game: you hire farmers and donkeys using the grains you collect and equip them with better shoes, bigger bags to carry more grains before they have to spin. back to the silo, etc. This way you can increase your grain harvest.

But this is not the real game in Lord Of The Harvest. You can buy a beacon to control the direction of the reaper, or you can just have them operate outward from the center of your farm (I think the latter is better), but either way you will also begin to explore the edges of the chalk drawings, under the rustling trees. You find artifacts from an earlier world. Each new standing stone you approach opens a new song and it sends sound waves through the bead. You also meet people at the rocks, all of which are like the ones you’ve heard in an old story: Jessica Ovaltine, the husband who stole a chicken and thought he was the lord.

That’s the detail I love. The commotion of your workers. The music is a mix of delicate acoustic guitars, and over time, more and more sudden mechanical rattles or electronic mufflers. Chalk drawings bring nature images of seasons and animals in addition to the … surprises. The chapter names are very specific but quirky. It just got weird for me when I zoomed in and realized what ‘donkeys’ really were. When did this happen? Where? To who??

Peter Talisman is the kind of game that makes me think of a lot of other things. The Wicked Man. The giant white horse in the hills where I come from. Ritual of the Moon. Terry Pratchett. My first year film module at uni. Winamp . Custom Interface. Beaten with a hammer at the Summer Solstice in Avebury and supplied with ketamine by a woman carrying a baby and wearing giant goat horns. Bread.

Very good, more please. Embark on your own quest to hear the music of the stones here.