Harold Halibut is a handmade narrative game about friendship and life on a city-sized spaceship submerged in an alien ocean.
It’s been 250 years since your home - an ark-like spaceship - fled an Earth on the verge of cold war to find a habitable planet to preserve the human race.
You are Ha...
Harold Halibut is a handmade narrative game about friendship and life on a city-sized spaceship submerged in an alien ocean.
It’s been 250 years since your home - an ark-like spaceship - fled an Earth on the verge of cold war to find a habitable planet to preserve the human race.
You are Harold, a young lab assistant for the ship’s lead scientist, Jeanne Mareaux. While most of the ship’s inhabitants have reconciled themselves to a life lived aboard the sunken ship, Mareaux still works tirelessly to find a way for the ship to leave the planet and find a new, dryer home.
But the weird, wonderful and diverse people of the FEDORA I keep Harold busy too… Until one fateful encounter plunges Harold into a world no one could have imagined - and one that may hold the key to Mareaux’s re-launch plans.
Join Harold as he explores a vibrant retro-future world in his quest to find the true meaning of ‘home’.
Features:
Unique Stop-Motion Aesthetics: Every element in Harold Halibut is a tactile and meticulously hand-crafted using traditional sculpting and model-making techniques.
Full Voice Acting: All of the Fedoras' wonderful inhabitants come to life with full English voiceover, elevating the game's narrative to cinematic proportions.
An expansive Character Ensemble: Meet a variety of unique characters and get to know their personalities, quirks and stories through meaningful conversations.
A riveting cinematic storyline: Journey through a captivating narrative, underscored by a carefully orchestrated script that blends drama, humor, and suspense.
First off the game has amazing visuals, but unfortunately that isn't enough to save it from being a mediocre experience. There is so little gameplay aside from fetch quests and really simple minigames. The sidequests don't add much and just slows down the pacing of the game. The characters are fun, but they overstay their welcome. The game had the potential to be really great, but it needs some cutting down, and some actual gameplay to justify being a game instead of just being a claymation movie.
Playing this game through GamePass and several hours in I’m seriously contemplating abandoning it for good without finishing it. As it is I feel like I have to force myself to play it. Here are the details.
PROS:
- The game looks beautiful. The way it imitates a stop-motion animation visual style (though without stop-motion animation) and manages to maintain the illusion hours in is nothing short of astonishing. It particularly shines in close-up conversations.
- Voice acting fits the visuals perfectly and helps convey emotions so well you won’t notice the limited facial animations.
CONS:
- It is just so BORING. The plot moves at a snail’s pace and the side objectives you get in the meantime are extraordinarily slow, uninteresting and repetitive. About 2 hours in Harold recognizes this but the game goes on the same way. Listen, pointing out a major flaw of your narrative is unhelpful if you’re not going to do anything to change it.
- The main character, Harold, is a dunce, but not in a funny way. Characters in general are unlikable and treat Harold like trash while he just takes it. He’s just not compelling. And no, singing about how useless you are while refusing to do anything about it is not character development.
- The art style, while gorgeous, brings expectations that the game doesn’t meet. It’s not cinematic in any way. Nearly all cutscenes are shot-reverse-shot with boring camera angles. All important plot developments are treated like regular dialogue, with no change in ambience, while the same elevator background music plays without change, like nothing important happened.
- There are no puzzles whatsoever. The game is a long series of fetch quests where you never get to use your brains.
As it is the game is basically a glorified tech demo. I applaud the effort and I encourage more developers to try art styles like this one more often. I hope in the future someone takes this art direction and makes an interesting game with it. But this isn’t it.
Gameplay is not too taxing, its a game to take your time absorbing the characters and atmosphere.
But it's compelling enough if you can stick with it.
Also it currently does support Achievements, Cloud Saves, and Controllers (Xbox-Xinput variations at least) despite those features not mentioned on the store page.
Played the game start to finished. Other than some glitches here and there I dont really have any complaints. It is a slower, chill type of game. In truth, the only reason I gave it a shot was because of the stop-motion/claymation look of it. Wasnt the type of game I expected, but I still ended up enjoying it. If the game even looks slightly interesting, give it a try.
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Last 30 daysLast 90 daysLast 6 monthsWheneverAfter releaseDuring Early Access
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