Harold Halibut review: eye-popping indie trades gameplay for claymation spectacle

15.04.2024 - 13:03 / digitaltrends.com / Harold Halibut / Giovanni Colantonio

Harold Halibut Score Details Pros

• Amazing visual style
• Detailed sets
• Inventive writing
• Memorable characters

• Slow pace
• Limited world
• Lacking meaningful interactivity

It’s not the ocean that’ll drown you in Harold Halibut; it’s complacency.

In the ambitious debut from Slow Bros., a small community lives out a lonely life aboard a spaceship that’s trapped underneath an alien planet’s ocean. As the ship’s few scientists work to craft plans to relaunch the ship back into space, its eccentric locals have learned to accept their isolated, water-logged lives. That includes Harold, a janitor who has never seen life beyond the few metal corridors he was raised in. And while the possibility of freedom should give him cause for celebration, it serves as a point of anxiety, too. What if a proper life on land isn’t all it’s cracked up to be? Maybe it would just be easier to drown in comfort.

• Harold Halibut impressions: Claymation brings a charming city to life

That human story does a lot of heavy lifting in Harold Halibut, a respectable debut torn between worlds. As a narrative experience, it’s a jaw-dropping feat thanks to strong writing and a unique handmade art style unlike anything I’ve seen in a game before. That cinematic style leads to some sacrifices, though, as slow pacing, a limited world, and a lack of meaningful interaction make it less engaging as a work of interactive fiction. But if Harold Halibut taught me anything, it’s that I’d rather take a daring creative vision like this over a safe, boring one.

Lost in space

Harold Halibut is a narrative-focused adventure game that shares tonal similarities to the animated works of Wes Anderson. Set on the Fedora, a sunken spaceship that’s turned into an isolated town linked by a tube transit system, the 10-hour story is told through dry humor, understated social satire, and banter with local eccentrics. Despite its grim sci-fi setup, it’s a warm and endearing story that treats each resident of the Fedora with empathy, from the ship’s weirdo captain to its lovable old mailman.

In its early chapters, there’s an emphasis on the mundane. I spend the first few hours doing menial labor as Harold, fixing water filters and scrubbing mysterious graffiti off of walls. It’s a maddening but effective introduction to Harold’s claustrophobic world. In its first five hours, I’m slowly walking between a small handful of mini-districts on the ship, all at the mercy of a painfully slow transit system that even a Fedora lifer like Harold is sick of. By the time the story introduces its first twist, as Harold discovers a fishlike alien stuck in the Fedora’s filter, I’m eager to escape.

The plodding, repetitive setup would perhaps work better if there were