Harold Halibut Review

A game more than a decade in the making, Harold Halibut is certainly unique. Featuring handmade clay models in handcrafted environments, developer Slow Bros' game has an irrefutable charm that immediately makes it seem all the more intriguing. This is a clear labour of love, with its creators' actual fingerprints plain to see all over the malleable visages of its cast, and within the ramshackle interiors of the space station that Harold calls home. What follows, however, is an adventure that unfolds at a sedentary pace, never being in any particular hurry to go anywhere.

 

The unassuming hero of his own game, Harold Halibut lives out a seemingly unremarkable life as a filter maintenance man aboard the Fedora, a city-sized vessel that fell from the stars into an ocean somewhere, on its way to seek out a new world to settle. We pick up with Harold as he muddles through his humdrum day to day as assistant to Mareaux, one of the ship's scientists, carrying out menial tasks and interacting with the various denizens who each have their own roles in keeping the Fedora ticking over.

Harold's duties involve riding the Fedora's tube system – a series of pipes that take you to each district of the ship, blasting you through the murky uranium-green water hanging outside the portholes and windows like lime jelly. Normally, you're helping out brainiac Cyrus with an experiment or some such, delivering something to Brigitte's laboratory, or getting involved in shenanigans of some sort. But everything you do demands a lot of chat with the dozen or so survivors living their lives aboard the ship, while the All Water Corporation helps devise a plan to get the Fedora out of the ocean depths and back into outer space, as the clock ticks away.

Soon, however, Harold's mundane daily routine is uprooted by the arrival of a mysterious fishy creature in the ship's filter, although the game's objectives remain the same – walk around, talk to people, and carry out tasks at their behest. Objectives are added to a 'To Do' list in Harold's electronic pocket journal thing, and there are numerous optional quests to tackle, too, if you have the inclination. There is something meditative and cosy about jogging your merry way through the ship's different areas via the All Water tubes, learning more about the Fedora's inhabitants while lending a hand, but after a few hours, you'll be screaming out for something, anything of note to happen.

 

Harold isn't alone, but he is lonely, so when fishy alien being Weeoo turns up, things do take a turn, and before long you're taken on a strange flight of fancy, especially once you take a journey to Weeoo's cave home and down a subterranean hole, on a mission to acquire a mysterious power source for the Fedora. Only by acquiring said power source will the ship have a fighting chance at breaking the water and making it through the stratosphere – this is when Harold Halibut starts to raise the stakes a tad, but it's incredibly late in the game and veers off on some weird, psychedelic, metaphysical trip.

Time is precious. So it's somewhat ironic that a game in which one subplot involves ‘time theft’ should respect yours so little. Harold Halibut begins at a languid pace and it stays there, its 10-15 hour runtime slowly unfurling in deliberately ponderous fashion. There's a tight 6-8 hour adventure in here somewhere, but it's lost in a sea of painfully slow and lengthy dialogue exchanges, far too many fetch quests, and a narrative that fails to be truly gripping at any juncture. Ideally, this is the sort of experience you should let wash over you – sometimes it's nice to sit back and enjoy a gentle story, and there's an innate, heartfelt message of kindness, nicety, and positive cooperation to Harold's tale.

 

There are a lot of things to like about Harold Halibut, then (both the game and the character), from its painstakingly handmade cast and the world they inhabit, to the close relationship and bond that Harold and Weeoo form with one another. The game's ending provides a nice, emotional final beat, too, after going through a lot with Harold and Weeoo, but it takes so long in getting there that its impact can't help but be dampened somewhat. I desperately wanted to love Harold Halibut – it's exactly the sort of indie passion project that it's great to play and get behind. But when it feels like you're traipsing back and forth over the same ground again and again for hours on end, and the narrative fails to grab you, it becomes slightly harder to give this a full-throated, hearty recommendation.