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.
