Harold Halibut
A beautiful stop-motion game ten years in the making
THERE’S BUDDY THE POSTMAN WHO HAS BEEFY CALVES AND RUNS EVERYWHERE
If you were to fling the last humans to a distant planet and raise them on a spaceship for 250 years, you’d end up with some weirdos. Harold Halibut is about just such a group, and turns out that humanity’s last hopes are indeed a quirky bunch.
Mr Halibut himself is one such resident of this city. He’s the ship’s handyman and lab assistant to lead scientist, Jeanne Mareaux, who is trying to find a way to get humanity’s metropolis unstuck and back into space. Turns out after leaving Earth the space vessel’s residents hoped they would find another planet, but accidentally crash-landed, leaving everyone trapped underneath the waves of an alien world. Not that they seem to care much – many of the inhabitants have found peace with their underwater life.
It’s a sci-fi adventure that developer Slow Bros says tackles the topics of love, family, grief, and relationships. But Harold Halibut’s main attraction is that the game looks gorgeous. Its story is told completely through stop-motion visuals, and the graphics have taken the team a long time to perfect.
“Almost ten years,” Slow Bros’ game director Onat Hekimoglu says. “Counting initial idea gathering, years of experimental technology development next to school and other jobs, setting up a company and a lot more. We’re excited to provide a really dense worldbuilding setup that lets your curiosity guide you.”
RAPTUROUS
That’s exactly what I do as I play through the game’s first chapter. The preview is light on story and instead lets you explore the submerged city. It’s incredible knowing that everything has been physically made. The delicate facial features of the character models, every handcrafted item on the general store’s shelf, the wooden floorboards, rusty pipes, knitted jumpers – there are hundreds of tiny details.
“Fabian Preuschoff, the set architect, would build the set at a 1:10 scale from materials ranging from children’s clay to welded metal or aged wood,” Hekimoglu says. “Then it would be painted, ‘aged’ via chemicals that create rust and other patinas, then add the details like dirt/dust smeared on the wall.”
If you look carefully, you can see the painterly brush strokes on faded posters and store signs, and even the tiles on the arcade floor look like someone has cut out hundreds of tiny vinyl squares. One character wears a tiny, well-worn knitted jumper with a smiley face sewn in. Exploring the ship, you get introduced to many of its inhabitants. There’s Buddy the postman who has beefy calves and runs everywhere, insisting he keeps his promise of same-day delivery. The general store owner, Tommy, believes that his wife has lost interest in him and so in an attempt to win her back, builds a neon sign above his store declaring his love for her. My favourite is the shop owner of a clothing store whose sheer excitement for selling winter wear on a spaceship with zero climate is remarkable.
“The people living on this ship are supposed to represent a cross-section of what it might be like to isolate a human population for a long time,” Hekimoglu says. “We tried to balance Earthly contemporary conventions and an amplified ‘game of telephone’ version of conventions from the past.” I love the idea that the last of humanity ended up getting everything not quite right.
HaroldHalibut’s Steam page says it’s “coming soon” although I’m pretty sure Slow Bros has kept it that way for the past several years. Let’s hope that we’ll get to play it sooner rather than later.