A five-year long search for what became known as the Evil Farming Game recently came to an anticlimactic end.
In 2016, Reddit user “Sparta213” made a post inquiring whether anyone else remembered a violent farming game that was “kind of like Harvest Moon.” In it, they explained, you play as a farmer who kills his wife and must juggle running a farm with hiding her body from law enforcement and the rest of the town.
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Sparta213 admitted to knowing “almost nothing about this game,” but that it came out in the 2000s and was “100 percent not a browser game.”
The post garnered some attention, mainly from other users wondering if the game had been discovered, but would eventually spark a wild goose chase that would span Twitter, Discord, Reddit, and years of internet and video game content. The investigation even spawned its own subreddit, r/ThatEvilFarmingGame.
Video game sleuths theorized and combed the internet for possible games that fit this description, often swearing that they also remembered playing the Evil Farming Game during the 2000s. Reddit user Simone Bruhn, or “Plumpdev,” even reportedly spent nearly 14 hours a day searching through old websites of downloadable indie games in search of the EFG that they also recalled playing.
But the answer turned out to be much simpler than that.
On June 12th, EFG Discord user “AqueousSnake” shared a clip from a 2015 stream done by video game streamer Vinesauce Joel, saying they were certain that the EFG phenomenon grew out of this video. In the clip, Vinesauce Joel invented and joked about a horror version of Harvest Moon, riffing off of the name of another video game called Body Harvest.
“It sounds like Harvest Moon but with corpses… That would be a fun game,” he said in the stream. “You play Harvest Moon, but throughout all the gameplay, you gotta hide a dead corpse.”
In his description, the farmer accidentally kills his wife with a kebab skewer and must hide her body from law enforcement and health inspectors, all while running his farm.
Some speculated that Sparta213 was recalling a fan-made video game based off of this joke, but research done by EFG sleuths uncovered nothing.
According to screenshots from the EFG discord and a comment left on r/ThatEvilFarmingGame, Sparta213 watched the clip and confirmed on Monday that this was what he was thinking of. “As anticlimactic as it may be, I believe that this is likely the source of the game,” he said. “It fits everything exactly.” He even goes on to admit that he used to fall asleep to Vinesauce Joel’s videos.
Vinesauce Joel addressed the controversy and apologized for all the confusion on Wednesday during his stream. “Apparently, I had started some really out-there video game rumor,” he said. “I just want to say, oops, sorry. I feel like I’ve detonated a nuclear bomb.”
However, some still believe that other evil farming games definitely exist since so many people seemed to recall playing them in the 2000s.
A game inspired by the Evil Farming Game is now in development by Whistleblower Studios. Evil Farming Game: Replanted is slated to be released in October 2021.
