Harold Halibut Review

On paper, Harold Halibut is a game that I should love – a narrative adventure with an intriguing sci-fi premise and a gorgeous handmade stop-motion aesthetic. But while it has a lot of charm and excellent visuals, disappointingly the act of playing it is kind of boring. Which is a shame given German developer Slow Bros spent 14 years working on the game, largely due to the demanding nature of its hand-crafted stop-motion visuals.

Set 250 years in the future, you play as the titular Harold Halibut, a lab assistant and semi-jack-of-all-trades on board the crashed spaceship known as the Fedora. You see, in the late 70s, Earth was on its last legs, and the Fedora (funded by the All Water Corporation) took flight to find a new planet to call home. However, instead of finding a new home, the Fedora crashed on a planet completely underwater, and since then, humanity has become accustomed to living in its new habitat, although some of the Fedorians haven’t given up hope and their search for ways to get the Fedora airborne again.

The hand-made sets look incredible

It’d be remiss of me not to wax lyrical about the game’s most enticing and best feature – the stop-motion visuals, all of which were handmade using traditional sculpting and model creation methods and then digitised. The result is a remarkable aesthetic that easily deserves all the plaudits it receives. Each location has been meticulously created, and every time I accessed a new area, I would spend a few minutes soaking up all the details. But alas, looks aren’t everything, and while Harold Halibut certainly has the style, it lacks a lot of substance in other areas.

Harold himself is a bit of a dweeb, tolerated by the rest of the denizens on the Fedora who will often treat him like he’s a bit of an idiot or just be downright cruel, and due to his meek personality, Harold will simply cop it on the chin. At first, it makes playing as Harold a bit of a chore, as your colleagues continuously lampoon him for almost everything he does. Truth be told, Harold does very little to convince the player that he’s not a few sandwiches short of a picnic early doors, but in the latter half of the narrative Harold starts to open up and proves that he’s more than a simple punching bag. The problem though, is that the gameplay might put you in a catatonic state of boredom before you get there.

The face of a man who has seen some shit

As an adventure game, you’d probably be expecting some puzzle solving, but there’s none of that here. Instead, it’s more of a passive interactive experience that sees you completing fetch quest after fetch quest and engaging in pointless conversation with the game’s cast of characters. The bulk of the story will see Harold toing and froing between the different parts of the Fedora using the tube system that connects the ship. Objectives generally don’t take much more than a few minutes to complete but can feel a lot longer due to the laborious nature of them and the speed at which Harold moves, even when jogging. Objectives can be things like person A asking you to deliver a message to person B, who’ll then have another message for you to take back to person A, which feels redundant given everyone can communicate via a PDA. Or you’ll be asked by one character to find a piece of equipment and deliver it back to them or to ask someone for help only to be rebuffed every time. None of it is remotely exciting, and although some characters are likable, conversations drag on and rarely bear worthwhile fruit.

The narrative, thankfully, is a bit more exciting than the gameplay, with the Fedora receiving a message explaining that Earth not only survived its inevitable apocalypse, it is now thriving. There’s suspicion that the All Water Corporation is up to no good, and Harold discovers that the humans on board the Fedora are not the only species that this planet houses. These plot moments spice the story up and sometimes the writing can hit the right notes, but sadly the game’s 12ish hour campaign is its main Achilles’ heel because even when the story starts to get interesting, the gameplay never evolves into anything more than fetch quests and mundane tasks.

Under the sea, where the weiners are meaner

Final Thoughts

While Harold Halibut doesn’t quite hit the heights it sets out to reach, you have to admire Slow Bros.’ unwavering commitment to its vision it spent 14 years bringing to life. Unfortunately, Harold Halibut’s stop-motion visuals do the majority of the heavy lifting, with the game’s repetitive and shallow gameplay reducing the overall experience to a tedious trudge through underwater space.

Reviewed on PS5 // Review code supplied by publisher

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