[Review] Cellular Harvest - Nintendo Switch

Developed By: Redact Games
Published By: aPriori Digital
Categories: Photography
Release Date: 02.10.22

Cellular Harvest really is an odd game isn’t it. A low poly, photography game. That is totally niche and totally my kind of game. I was super excited when I got the privilege to play this game. Not only is the premise itself strange, but the way it fully presents itself. You land on the planet, go take some photos of the alien life on it.

You need to collect info on 75% of the life on this planet. To do this, you’ll need to take lots of photos. See a new creature? Take a photo of it. See another one of those creatures? Take a photo of that too. All in the name of research. I love how so many of these things look, I love learning about them too, it really makes me want to keep finding and recording them. The new world you’re on is bigger than I expected it to be. You’re not going to get lost as I always found pathways to get to place to place a linear affair, but I was just shocked to see how much further and further they went.

You’re not just walking around, you’re jumping too! Cellular Harvest has you doing a lot of vertical movement and exploration too. You’ll need to find some way to photograph those airborne creatures. Or sometimes, it’s just a good way for you to maneuver around and just get the right angle. At the end of the day, you really just need to get photos, doesn’t how good they are. But for me, I gotta get just the right one. It’s the Pokemon Snap player in me.

If I didn’t make it obvious, I love the low poly look that Cellular Harvest has. Not enough games trying to get that kind of look, so I take notice when games do. You can definitely see the texture seams on certain objects, like walls, but it was never distracting, and the game has an odd style anyway, so it was never really a bad thing for me.

I have to pick one thing I do dislike about Cellular Harvest right? It’s that you perhaps move a tad too slow. Running is mapped to clicking in the left stick, but the default speed feels too slow and it’s not exactly ideal to just endlessly hold down the stick.

All of this sound up your alley? Definitely give Cellular Harvest a look. It’s not too hard, it’s really relaxing, and it fills some of those holes in games I wanna play.