In the mess of yesterday’s Nintendo Direct and State of Play, there was a bit of news that came out of Harvestella’s new demo that got a little lost. The demo launched yesterday after the Direct, and will let you carry your progress over to the full game when it launches on November 4. But one of the notable things it reveals is that Square Enix’s RPG/farming sim hybrid will allow players to choose a non-binary option when making your character, and generally seems inclusive to people of different gender presentations across the board.
The Harvestella demo opens asking if you want to play a male, female, or non-binary character, then allows you to pick from eight appearance pre-sets which aren’t locked behind gender at all. The appearance choices are one of two models with four different skin tones, and regardless of how you look, the game will recognize your character’s pronouns based on your first decision. After you’ve picked your body and skin tone, you can choose between 12 different hair colors, 15 eye colors, and two different voices. The character creation concludes by allowing you to pick a name with up to ten characters (Ein is the default).
You may also like:
- Saints Row Helped Me Realize I’m Trans
- How A Sims 4 Modder Helped the Game Reach its Queer Potential
- Haven Proves Games Can Be Queer Inclusive If There’s the Will
It’s hardly the most robust character creator out there, but it’s great to see Harvestella not adhering strictly to some binary when other games have had much broader appearance options but still designate the player as male or female. I’ve been replaying Cyberpunk 2077, and that game has plenty of choices to make for your character’s physical appearance, but defines their pronouns as male or female depending on their voice with no nonbinary option. Hell, that’s shitty on its own, but designating that a character’s pronouns are determined by voice is such an avoidable problem well demonstrated by Harvestella. So it’s exciting to see more games leaning into this.
Harvestella is coming to Switch and PC on November 4.
