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After 14 years in the making, Harold Halibut finally launches next month
21.03.2024 - 22:15 / digitaltrends.com / Harold Halibut / Giovanni Colantonio
Harold Halibut, a game that’s been in the works for 14 years, is finally coming out. The handcrafted narrative adventure is set to launch on April 16 on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC. Ahead of its release date announcement, Digital Trends got a closer look at the project, going hands-on with the first five hours of the ambitious project and getting insight into its unusual development from its creators.
The debut title from Slow Bros. tells a sci-fi story about a small community living entirely within a spaceship, the Fedora, that’s trapped in an alien planet’s ocean. Players take on the role of Harold, an assistant to a scientist aboard the ship who’s looking for a way to free it and continue its intended journey. Though that premise may sound dark, it’s warm in its tone, focusing on the relationships between its cast of eccentric characters.
What’s notable about it, though, is that just about every object in the game has been handcrafted. It looks like a work of claymation, which starts to explain why it took so long to make. In a presentation to press ahead of its launch, Slow Bros. co-founders Onat Hekimoglu and Ole Tillmann went into depth about the project’s development cycle and the many iterations ofHarold Halibut that came out of it.
The project was first conceived in 2010 as a traditional point-and-click adventure game with a focus on puzzle solving. The co-founders noted that, at the time, the decision to use handcrafted objects was less an aesthetic choice and more a necessity since no one involved in its early creation “knew how to draw.” Thus, the team decided early on that it would create models of everything from characters to sets and scan them into the game.
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While Harold Halibut looks like it’s stop-motion animated as a result, that’s not exactly accurate. Instead, all objects were scanned into the game using photogrammetry, a process that would task the team with taking and uploading hundreds of photos of each object to digitize them. Objects were cleaned up from there and characters were animated using motion capture technology, giving the puppets their movement.
While that meant that Slow Bros. didn’t necessarily have to animate real objects frame by frame, it still required a tremendous amount of work for a small team that was mostly doing it as a side gig from 2012 to 2016. Each object was painstakingly made with multiple materials, with the studio going as far as to handmake flooring in spaces that barely even appear on-screen. Tillmann noted that the
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