"Harold Halibut" Review

Publisher: Slow Bros.

Developer: Slow Bros.

Available for: Playstation 5, Xbox Series X/S, Microsoft Windows

Reviewed for: Playstation 5

Dear reader, I have one question for you....have you ever had a dream? Something you really wanted to put out into the world that not everybody would like, but that you'd still find fulfilling to create? Well, the hardworking team at German independent studio "Slow Bros," did. In fact, they spent at least 10 years in the process of creating it. This passion project is our topic for today: Harold Halibut. It's a game that isn't going to be enjoyed by a massive amount of people, and in fact, several people might question why a studio would spend such a long time on a game like this. I, however, am not most people, and clear passion can go a long way with me. Make no mistake: Harold Halibut has some missteps, but it's SO charming and genuine that I can't help but keep on mentally coming back to it even though there isn't much in the way of replay value. So, let me take the time to break it all down for you!

Normally I start off with a discussion of story and characters, but this game requires a bit of discussion before we get to that. Harold Halibut is, as far as I know, the first stop-motion game ever created. Do you know how much work goes into stop motion films? It takes a lot of time and man hours, and the runtime of the most epic-scale stop-motion spectacles (such as Kubo and the Two Strings) is an hour and a half at most. Harold Halibut has a runtime of at least 6 hours, but it has a trophy that you receive for taking 15 hours or more to finish the game. In a movie, every character is exactly in the right place at the exact time they need to be there. But in a game, a stop-motion character has to respond to any given player input with hundreds upon hundreds of tiny character posture and position updates. There's probably a plethora of little tricks that make this kind of game a lot less labor and time intensive than I'm assuming, but as someone with absolutely no knowledge about these things, it's an impressive feat.

Now, with that out of the way, let's get to my usual starting point. You play as the titular Harold Halibut: a mentally aloof, honest-to-a-fault, genuinely kind laboratory assistant and maintenance man who lives on a now-underwater spaceship called the "Fedora 1." See, during the cold war, a gigantic spaceship was sent off into the wild dark yonder in search of a new planet that could be called home in the ever-looming possibility of nuclear war on Earth. This was a project meant to last generations, and that's exactly what it did. The ship traveled for long enough for generations of people to be born and die with Earth becoming more and more of a distant memory. And eventually, the Fedora 1 was hit by a rogue solar wind in a faraway galaxy, was disabled, and crashed into the ocean of an alien planet. Several hundred years after the fact, human society aboard the Fedora has completely adapted to a life below the sea. For many of them, the possibility of returning to Earth is nothing but a pipe dream. However, there's evidence of an impending crisis wherein the bacteria that allows the occupants to continue to generate electricity and oxygen might either run out or stop producing the results they want. So, the citizenry as well as the clearly evil All Water Corporation (which owns everything on the ship) have a renewed sense of adventure as the clock starts counting down for the first time in at least 22000 days underwater. This is the context in which our everyman-of-all-everymen protagonist finds himself.

Harold, for his part, is a shoe-in for Protagonist of the Year in my estimation. Anything can happen between now and 2025, but that's my prediction at the moment. He's a passive fellow who constantly gets talked down to by others on the ship...but despite that, he isn't bitter, and this is a rare game in which the fact that everyone talks down to the protagonist is actually funny. But the fact that Harold doesn't feel bitter towards his neighbors doesn't mean that he's totally satisfied with his lot in life. He has to do the hard, unglamorous tasks that nobody else can do, and he does these things with practically no thanks. And the thing that made me root for him more than anything else is the fact that he's lonely but doesn't realize it.  When he's doing one of his many thankless jobs, he can't help but talk out loud or talk to whatever his current tool is. This leads to a particularly memorable segment where he breaks out into a pretty impressive song and dance routine in which he asks the ultimate question: "surely, there's more to life?" All of this character development builds up to a moment that nobody on the Fedora, much less Harold, could've predicted. On a routine middle-of-the-night call to drain the station's filters, Harold notices something off...and discovers an alien floating in the water he was called to drain. From there, we have our story. Harold and the professor he assists try to figure out how to communicate with this new entity, to figure out why this entity's skin cells seem to point to a potential solution to the station's energy crisis, and all the while, they try to keep it hidden from the aforementioned evil corporation that owns the station. 

That's all the specific details I'm going to give on the plot, but I do need to say a little bit more before we move on. 

You read the past couple segments and made assumptions about where the plot might go. The lack of a question mark at the end of that last sentence wasn't a typo: I'm not saying "maybe" you made assumptions...I know for a fact that you did. Whether you made assumptions based on the bit about the alien skin cells or based on the fact that there's an evil corporation in charge of everything, you 100% have expectations about where the story will go. And I'd bet money that your expectations are wrong. Despite having the trappings of a predictable story, there isn't a single predictable bone in this game's body. That's yet another thing I have to commend this development team for. In fact, that unpredictability fuels the fire of this game's already stellar sense of humor. To paraphrase people who reviewed this long before I did, despite how clearly ocean-themed this game is, the humor is as dry as it gets. Honestly, this is the closest I've gotten to experiencing the comedic highs of the Coen Brothers' A Serious Man (in which a couple discussing getting divorced is belly-laugh funny). Poor Harold gets steamrolled from all sides and talked down to the whole time, and it never ceases to be amusing.

So, how does the game fare on the technical front? It's a bit hit or miss. There tends to be a little bit of stuttering as the game transitions from gameplay to cutscenes. There's also plenty of times where Harold will have his leg go through his bed or other objects in the environment. I'm not going to hold that against the game, though, as that kind of problem no doubt is an unavoidable part of creating a game based off of real-world assets scanned into the environment. What's not quite as forgivable is the vagueness of the game's quests. The world is a small place, so it's not like it takes a long time to go to every nook and cranny. However, very few objectives have any hint as to where you need to go. Take one of the earliest quests, for example. Harold is tasked with going to the filter and doing some maintenance work...but there's no hint as to where the filter is. As I said, this is a pretty small game world, so you will find where you need to be before too long. However, pair this with the fact that some characters will change where they are between necessary interactions, and you'll find yourself making note of where a character was when you talked to them last, only to return to them because an objective tells you to, find they aren't where you left them, then search the whole ship again looking for their new location. Then there's the fact that there are times where an interaction is locked until you complete a certain objective. To give another early-game example, there's an objective where you have to find a local shop owner, but this objective comes only after the rest of that particular floor opens up. So, you'll either find the shop owner or go down one or two seemingly dead ends. Once you find the shop owner, you'll be given another objective where you have to find a character you haven't tracked down before. If you went down just one dead end before this point, you might intuit that the character is found in the other available area. Or if you went down all available dead ends, you might intuit that the character must be in the same district as the shop owner. It doesn't matter what you do. You will spend more time than necessary going over every nook and cranny of the ship in search of your next objective. That's before you get to the one or two objectives that simply tell you to "find something to do." And you know what's funny? This segment is also a perfectly valid discussion of gameplay, as walking around and talking to people (alongside the occasional super-simplistic puzzle) is the entire gameplay experience. But I've spent enough time talking about this flaw. One last thing I'll say is that it could be infinitely worse. As I've said, this game is small. But an unexpected side effect of the flaw I've been talking about is that it makes the player engage with the world more than they otherwise might if they were given more specific objectives.

So folks, I think the biggest potential barrier to entry for you when it comes to Harold Halibut is your gameplay needs. If you don't like games that are pretty much solely based around story and some super light puzzles, you likely aren't going to be drawn in enough by the novelty of the stop-motion visuals. But if that novelty plus the promise of a story in equal parts entertaining as unpredictable, then you're not going to want to sleep on this decade-in-the-making passion project.

Let us review:

Technical woes: -0.5

The final score for Harold Halibut is...

9.5/10 - Near Masterpiece

Excellent work, Slow Bros., excellent work!