Harold Halibut
Look out space, Fedoras are go
“THE SETS AND CHARACTERS HAVE BEEN MADE USING TRADITIONAL TECHNIQUES AND MATERIALS AND SCANNED INTO THE GAME.”
FORMAT PS4 / ETA TBC / PUB SLOW BROS / DEV SLOW BROS / PLAYERS 1
The Cold War isn’t just a setting for Call Of Duty campaigns. It was a real, tumultuous time when the threat of nuclear disaster was all too real. Harold Halibut is set 250 years after an ark launched into space to preserve humanity amid fears of global destruction, and it’s a jaw-dropping stopmotion visual feast.
Unfortunately, the spaceship Fedora’s target ‘habitable’ planet turned out not to have any land masses, instead being covered in water with a toxic above-surface atmosphere, meaning that the refugees from Earth have had to adapt to living underwater, tipping their hats to the Fedora for providing them sanctuary.
STOP THE PRESSES
With classic stop-motion looks and assisted by its retro-future aesthetic, it looks like a super-highresolution, playable ’60s Gerry Anderson ‘Supermarionation’ TV series (think Thunderbirds and Stingray). The sets and characters don’t just resemble animated models, they’ve been made using traditional techniques and materials and scanned into the game.
From the detailed sets to the characters themselves, whose heads are “walnut”-sized, the goal has been to meld Slow Bros’ love of stop-motion animation with narrative adventure games. The character animation has been motion captured from those models, and there are over 40 of them in the game, with about eight hours of fully voiced dialogue spread across an adventure that promises about twice that, estimated at 12 to 18 hours of activity.
SINKING FEELING
Harold Halibut himself is a lab assistant for Jeanne Mareux, the Fedora’s lead scientist. That’s a pretty important position when every person in your population is relying on the spaceship to keep them alive deep below an alien sea. Generations have been born and died since the Fedora’s launch
(some older folk on the ship can remember the initial landing), so the community is a close-knit one made up of interesting people, many of whom could use a helping hand from Halibut.
Some have grown accustomed to their lives, but just as some people on Earth dream of a life in space, some of the younger generation of Fedora residents dream of something more – either of returning to their home planet, or striking out to find a more habitable world than the one on which they find themselves.
Either way, after a strange signal is revealed to be a countdown window for the Fedora to launch once again, the time in which they can make the decision to stay or go, and prepare to live with their choice, begins to tick down. If they miss it, they’ll have to wait another 80 years before they can make the decision again. At the same time, Harold stumbles upon an encounter that reveals more about the planet they’re already on.
An adventure that’s been crafted with care, the animations look fluid, wider dioramas combining with zoomed-in close-ups to make you feel you’re really inside a beautiful stop-motion world. Harold appears to be a caring, softly spoken hero who just wants to do the right thing, and it’s a tale about finding out just what the right thing is, and when you should follow your dreams and when you should work to make things better where you already are.