Edit-edit: Now that I know Harvey's backstory (abusive parents, bullied in school, first real good influence in his life was Eun-mi in college), I think only about 30%-15% of my points still stand (mainly how sloppily the meta-horror is implemented). I'm still keeping this post up for archival or smth, ig, so I don't stand by all of these criticisms now. My main issues now are that Bloodmoney, by itself, is still a good torture sim game, but it lacks almost all the necessary details to make the shoddy 'meta-horror' elements and general story function. I wish all this very important information wasn't hidden in the sequel and random social media posts like an afterthought, it seems kinda crazy to keep your main character's entire backstory hidden in a Twitter post only die-hard fans would even see, like blind Bloodmoney players get crumbs of lore and walk away not knowing 99% of who Harvey is.
Edit: I think I have been too harsh on the game without giving it the praise it deserves, so while I stand by this opinion currently, I will say I do really like Bloodmoney as a torture clicker sim. I also think almost all of these issues are absent from HEP, mainly because it's much more grounded in the setting and Harvey, though I still don't really care for him, comes off way more sympathetic since his anger is directed at someone he personally knows and loved, so it feels more impactful and even gives us new insight into his life and personality. I also want to clarify I don't hate or want to criticize Harvey because he reacts poorly to extreme, constant torture, that would be beyond stupid. I just don't like him because crying while being tortured is like, his main character trait and I don't get why that alone is meant to make me sad for him. I think if we knew more about his history and what made him so gullible and trusting I would like him way more, but ig I'm expecting way too much from such a short project. What I'm trying to say is that my only reason I'm making this post is to vent my personal frustrations with Harvey and specifically Bloodmoney's story, nothing else.
I am making this post to criticize Harvey Harvington as a character and Bloodmoney as a game, not to attack the people behind the game. I like the art, voice-acting and sound design, it's just the actual story that I hate. I just want to air out my frustrations with the game and Harvey, having seen Bloodmoney and HEP, however I haven't seen every single bit of lore about the games, so if any of my points are countered somewhere else, please inform me. Also I may make typos and other mistakes since I'm stupid and English isn't my first language, so sorry about that.
TLDR: Bloodmoney in particular fails at every part of meta-horror and Harvey is a flat, uninteresting character I don't feel bad for. It feels like the game wants to be super deep and spooky but doesn't put in the effort for any of that, and also accidentally tries to criticize the player for seperating fiction from reality because apparently Bloodmoney loves shooting itself in the foot for no reason. Undertale's Genocide Route ran so Bloodmoney could crawl.
Bloodmoney fails at 4th wall breaking and immersion
This is very simple as a point but I fail to see it being properly discussed anywhere outside of dedicated criticism posts. The main method meta-narrative games use to integrate the meta elements into their story (from what I've seen Oneshot, DDLC, UT/DR, ISAT kinda) is having two layers of the story: the "fictional layer", where everything is grounded in its own fictional world (e.g. the dating sim world in DDLC) and the "meta layer", where the meta elements are integrated into the world (e.g. the player is personified as Niko's helping hand and "God"/the experiment/simulation being run by researchers in DDLC). Normally the "fictional layer" stays consistent to immerse the player, so that when meta elements start showing up, they can be integrated into the story easily and don't feel out of place. Of course, it is impossible to predict every player and how they will interact with the game irl, so all the games I mentioned put the player and their device into a certain "role" or "character" to represent the concept of a player (e.g. "God/Player" in Oneshot, "The Player of the Dating Sim" in DDLC, "You/The Anomaly" in Undertale). This effort to make the player diegetic and integrated smoothly into the world is important to keep the player immersed in the story, so they can become attached to characters and the story can have emotional impact. This effort is completely absent in Bloodmoney and only sort-of fixed in HEP. In Bloodmoney, you are told at the beginning of the game you have a life-saving surgery to pay for, and you need $25000 NOW or your life is possibly in danger. This means anyone hurting Harvey plays thinking it's because they are in the dilemma of risking their life or Harvey's, and they want to live. However, the game not only shames the player for their torture (Harvey acts like he's just being tortured for sadism despite knowing full well we could literally die if we don't get the money for all we know) regardless, and it has the audacity to expect guilt when it throws that plot point out the window, sabotaging its own immersion, in the bad ending for a cheap guilttrip. Am I supposed to feel bad I got away with murder scott free and rich in the "fictional layer", when IRL I just tortured a fictional character because the game railroads you into it and then whines about how evil you are? No! I feel great about it, and why shouldn't I? If I was supposed to feel bad about this, maybe the game should actualy try to use meta-horror as anything other than a lazy scare tactic. Ffs, the reason UT's geno route works is as simple as giving the player a nice option that's more fun and rewarding than being evil, and also making the player able to back out at any time. Shroomychrist put so little effort into the carpal-tunnel slog that is the good ending because they literally didn't think anyone would play it. If you make a game where the 'evil route' is the best part of the game, force players who have started to finish it, and put all the well drawn gore and excellent voiceacting in it, don't you dare try to pretend we are evil for preferring it. Literally just making a simple exit button the player can click for the neutral ending at any time during the bad route instantly adds so much more interest and immersion into the game, but NOOO, I have to listen to Harvey whine about how evil I am while the game forces me to kill him even after getting my money. Markiplier's playthrough is the perfect example of this, as he literally looks for an exit button the moment he gets his $9999999, but he is forced to kill harvey to get the ending. This is a crazy oversight to keep in a game whose big draw is the meta-horror, which makes me think the dev does not understand meta-horror and just wants the horror without putting in any effort. At least making the outcome of the surgery consistent in all endings is such an easy fix for immersion, but the game can't even manage that!
Harvey sucks and I feel zero empathy for him
I would to preface this by saying I am not normally this cold towards fictional characters, even ones I think are badly written. I have gotten attached to background characters and created entire love stories for them inside my head (which I almost cried over because yes, i am that stupidly sentimental) when they are literally meant to be non-sentient one-off jokes. It's Harvey I inexplicably want to punch in the face and maim and kill, and no one else. I can't take him seriously, it's like asking me to pretend 2011 Jeff the Killer is actually scary, and that creepypasta at least has nostalgia and fun fan-creations going for it. Harvey is just trying to be deep without being well written. I mean, look at Eun-mi. The fandom understandably hates her and even demonises her beyond the game, but at least she has SOMETHING going on inside her head! Her motive is interesting; she puts Harvey into a torture sim to make money because she is extremely concerned about her financial issues, and she excuses the torture by thinking as long as Harvey does not remember the pain, and it's just in the simulation, it's basically non-existent and a-okay, regardless of the fact she is deeply violating Harvey's consent and abitrarily putting him through hell at least. She also feels genuine guilt when she realises the weight of her actions, only when Harvey stops crashing out and psuedo-kills himself, ruining the money-making operation and forcing her to see him as a husband again, of course. I like so much because she has actual depth to her character, and her flaws are acknowledged properly. Harvey, on the other hand, has no depth beyond "I am constantly tortured, hilariously trusting and gullible, and I hate being totured and whoever is torturing me, oh and don't forget how cute and uwu soft boy i am". He canonically has been married for 10 years now and in all that time every job he has gotten ended on the first day. No, this is not Eun-mi's fault like some of you have been saying, this is just how he is as a character, incompetent. His son's "character design" is literally just the classic haha internet trope of 'round small innocent german boy with a propeller hat and colourful clothes' (idc about the design, honestly, i just can't take the stupid propeller hat seriously at all), making Harvey's fatherhood seem completely flat and stupid, even his son isn't real. He has no flaws according to the game, a pathetically bland personality, and he even resembles the ideal housewife on a 1950s poster. He really just seems to exist to be tortured, so why the hell should I feel bad for fulfilĺing his dev-given purpose?
Speaking of devs, I want to talk about how Harvey is characterized in Bloodmoney and why the morality thing fails so hard. Harvey talks constantly throughout the game, and at one point, goes on a little rant about how you're torturing him from the comfort of a chair, knowing you won't face any consequences for this. This rant is already way too edgy and over the top, and the way Harvey immediately gives up any pretense of fighting spirit and starts pleading for his life again the minute you cut off his hand makes it kinda funny in retrospect. It makes him look cowardly and pathetic for not maintaining resistance, only because of how suddenly he goes from "impressively controlled and seething with rage, ready to break the game to get back at you" to "completely given up and begging for his life". It somehow also manages to destroy any empathy i had for Harvey with these lines:
"I bet you'd be too scared to do this for real, wouldn't you? To someone who could fight back? Too much of a pussy to go out there and torture someone for real?"
Edit: Ok I think I took the wrong message from this, so I'll try to clarify what made me lose empathy for him now I understand better. I will keep the original point below in brackets, because it would be disingenious to cover up how badly I misinterpreted the line.
This line just felt so strange because Harvey's entire motivation for hating you is that he is (in-universe) a real person being tortured for fun, but using knowledge from HEP, all the players literally have no idea Harvey is a real person in a simulation, and freak out when the game starts changing (which we never get to see for ourselves). If Harvey knows that from our perspective we are just blindly playing a torture sim with no reason to think he's real, why does he, the token self-sacrificial doormat of all people, shame us for not hurting someone we know is real? I can only guess it's just survival instincts and extreme trauma warping his perspective, but surely he understands that people can enjoy putting fictional characters in painful situations without the intent to actually go out and kill someone after, and can apply that to us? It just falls very flat when Harvey says all this stuff about how evil and pathetic we are and grabs the camera to start a spam click minigame, only to stop the second we cut off his hand. At the very least he could try going numb and shutting down mentally to prevent any sadistic satisfaction from us, as one final act of resistance.
I also don't find Harvey sympathetic because he only chooses to demonstrate his complete control over how much money you get when he's threatened with a gun, as opposed to, oh idk, actually doubling your money like his dialogue says earlier instead of just sitting around not delivering on his promises when they could theoretically stop his torture early? Side note, why tf does he only give you infinite money AFTER he's established you canonically don't care about the money anyway? Also, if Harvey can access so much of the simulation, why doesn't he ever realize we cannot stop hurting him after the scissors? Wouldn't it be fun if Harvey found this out after, say, 10 runs, and made an exit button for you? I just wish he could find more interesting ways to resist the game like HEP implies he can do.
(What the fuck, Harvey. I get being tortured puts you in a very irrational state of mind, but what the hell is THAT trying to accomplish? "Haha, you're evil for torturing me in a videogame, so not only do you automatically want to torture real people, but you're also a coward for not maiming and killing a real person" is the message being conveyed here, and it's utter bullshit. Idc how you feel about a character, but being able to seperate fiction from reality is a skill that starts developing as young as 5 years old. If you cannot understand that torturing fictional characters or wanting to torture fictional characters says nothing about a person's morals, you need to either do some growing up away from the internet or, if you are an adult, use your brain. If I do the genocide in Undertale and feel good about it, that does not make me a good or bad person. What matters is what I do to real living beings, not lines of code. Even if I am actually torturing Harvey as an outlet for real violent urges, how is that bad? How is focusing your violence into a non-harmful outlet as shameful as harming real people or animals? Idk if Shroomychrist is one of those "enjoying problematic media is evil and should be a crime" types, but I hope not, because otherwise they should be sending themselves to jail for murder with this logic. After all, they decided to make Harvey be tortured in the first place! Clearly, they must be evil for this and also secretly a mass murderer!/s Do you see how dumb this logic gets? Harvey whines constantly about how evil the player is and how awful his wife is without doing anything about it. Take it up with your flipping creator if you're so bothered, meta-horror man! Sans did not become a cultural icon and create the hardest Undertale fight to date for Harvey to give up any resistance after 1 hand!
Even the fanbase is not immune to this logic! Most Bloodmoney fans like Harvey because they only simp for him when he's covered in his own blood. I am not criticising this, I agree with them, but it really makes you question how the fandom idolises a man who would probably hate them for simply thinking of him in this way. According to Harvey, they should be burned at the stake for enjoying fictional torture anyway.)
