The deer who hired you runs your tutorial, grades your shifts — and carries the same TOP SECRET briefcase as everyone else tangled in the Animal Corp story. The July 10 update is literally named after him.
Light-orange muntjac deer — blue scrubs, white coat, stethoscope, head mirror
Your supervisor: tutorials, unlocks, and end-of-shift grades (Shifts 1–7)
A black suitcase stamped TOP SECRET in red
"Your sanity is important. Don't DIE on me."
The list above is the order. This is what it means at the window — because two of those three unlocks decide what you are even capable of seeing.
| Unlock | What you can do afterwards that you could not before |
|---|---|
| Shutters after Shift 1 | Refuse a patient at the window. This is the cheapest tool in the game — it costs no sanity, no ammunition and no shift score, and it stays the right answer any time you are unsure. |
| CCTV after Shift 1 | See the 8 of the 19 anomalies that are invisible any other way. Until this unlock you are not missing them through carelessness — you physically cannot detect them. |
| Shop + Rooms 6–8 after Shift 2 | Buy supplies at all, and take more patients per shift — the cap on patients is the number of rooms you have open. Room 8 is also where the Tentacle surgery event can trigger, so the unlock brings a threat with it. |
| Taser after Shift 3 | Your first weapon — and the answer to three of the nine threats. Tasing a confirmed anomaly is +2 sanity; tasing a normal animal by mistake is −15, which is why it arrives after the identification tools rather than before. |
Read in order, the sequence is deliberate: refuse, then see, then act. You spend your first two shifts with no weapon at all, which is not a handicap — it is the game teaching you that shutting the window is the move that never backfires.
Harlow appears from Shift 1 and grades you at the end of each shift through Shift 7, then disappears from the run. Nothing further unlocks after that — by the time he leaves you already have every tool the tutorial hands out, and Shifts 8 onward are the same hospital with a rising threat count rather than new equipment.
One honest gap: the grade he gives at the end of a shift is visible, but the formula behind it is not documented anywhere we could verify — not in the community wiki, not in patch notes. Anyone telling you exactly how the score is calculated is guessing. What is confirmed is what feeds into a bad run rather than a bad grade: animal deaths, of which three end the run.
The community theory: Harlow knows exactly what's infecting the patients and keeps hiring anyway. The game confirms none of it — we label theories as theories.
The update named after him shipped a new Dr. Harlow model and new Harlow interactions. What those interactions contain — and whether they advance the Animal Corp story — is still being documented by the community; we're tracking it on the updates page and will expand this section as details are verified.
Dr. Harlow is your boss — an orange muntjac deer in blue scrubs who appears at the start of your run, unlocks core features after each early shift (shutters and cameras, then the shop and ER, then the taser), and grades your performance at the end of every shift.
Unconfirmed. An anomaly version of Harlow with hollow eyes can be glimpsed at the lobby window through an easter egg, and he's been seen talking to an animal in a hazmat suit outside the hospital — the community suspects he knows more than he says, but the game hasn't confirmed anything.
Three things, in this order: shutters and the CCTV system after Shift 1, the shop and emergency Rooms 6–8 after Shift 2, and the taser after Shift 3. Nothing unlocks after that — he keeps grading you through Shift 7 and then stops appearing entirely.
Because what does Dr. Harlow unlock first tells you how the game wants you to play: refuse, then see, then act. Shutting the window costs nothing and can never be wrong, CCTV is the only way to detect 8 of the 19 anomalies, and only once you can identify a target does he hand you something that costs −15 sanity to use on the wrong animal.
No. He appears from Shift 1 and leaves after Shift 7, taking the tutorial and the end-of-shift grade with him. Everything from Shift 8 on runs on the tools you already have.
Harlow's Favorite Update — named after him — shipped a new Dr. Harlow model and new interactions with him. The full content of the new interactions is still being documented.
Details verified against community data; theories are labeled as theories. Last checked: July 26, 2026.