Harold Halibut (2024)

Harold Halibut feels a lot like a TV show, and that ends up being its greatest strength and greatest weakness. This is not a game to start up if you want to do much more than walk between dialogues and occasionally play a light minigame. But if you're down for an odd little slow-paced adventure that's more interested in having its quirky characters bounce off of each other than telling a riveting story, you might be in for a treat.

The claymation-eque art is immediately striking-- it's what drew me to the game to begin with. Each screen is zoomed far out as you walk around and looks like a little diorama with clay people moving around inside. When you go to talk to someone, the camera switches angles to move back and forth between characters in a more traditional sense, which lets you take in the work that went into their designs and the way they animate. At first I found it a bit odd that their mouths seem to move at a lower framerate than just about everything else, but I quickly got used to it as a stylistic quirk. This game oozes personality from both its locations and characters.

The writing, while rarely exciting or outrageously funny, is quaint and has a very British feel to its humor. I really enjoyed it personally, but I think if that's not your thing you won't find much here to love. The dialogue makes up the core of the experience and while you do get the occasional "choice" it never alters the flow of the narrative. Choices are mostly there to allow you to explore the world and its characters a bit more, should you desire to.

There is sort of a quest system you can find in your PDA. This is mostly for keeping track of all your active quests but also updates with silly crude drawings after major events. Some quests are totally optional but I did them all (as far as I know) to get the platinum trophy and for the most part liked them.

There is definitely too much backtracking here, even among just the main quests, and it gets a bit absurd in Chapter 4. Note that if you aim to do the platinum trophy you should use a nice spoiler free guide because this game is very unfriendly towards achievement hunters with how it requires you talk to people in a particular order for some stuff.

It is a bit odd that they committed to having this be a videogame instead of a show or something when there's very little interactivity, but it's sure to please the right kind of person. I can appreciate that the devs clearly knew what they wanted and went for it.

I have been really stoked for this game to play and just had to give it up at some point. I love the art direction of the handmade environment and it really is super cool. But, it's really something about the overly smooth and sloppy motion cap paired up with the unnatural floating cameras that just gives me the absolute ICK! It reminds me of some shows I watched as a kid that scared me, and this triggers that with the absolute uncanniness of the mocap.

Apart from that it's just an absolute slogfest. People meander for everyone and I DON'T CARE! I don't like anyone here especially not the main character. Skipping the never-ending uninteresting dialogue is solved by speeding up the animations making the already icky feelings even more ickier. Poor execution, a shame really.

Harold Halibut was among my most anticipated games of 2024. Its beautiful art style alone made me immediately drawn to it, and for the little I had seen I actually started thinking this might’ve ended up as one of my indie favourites of the past few years.

Boy was I wrong.

This game is long. And I do mean long. It’s not RPG-long, it’s long for what it needed to be. There is absolutely no reason for Harold Halibut to be anywhere close to 10 hours other than self-indulgence. And to me personally, that’s a cardinal sin in gaming. It is the same exact problem I had with Kentucky Route Zero when most everyone else was praising it: some people look at these and see artistic prowess - I see disrespect for the player’s time. Harold Halibut is particularly egregious as a self-indulgent exercise, since not only is it filled with things like pointless backtracking, uninteresting ‘puzzles’, boring slow motion segments (that nevertheless still demand your attention mechanically) and needless exposés, it does so in a way that is so in your face that it becomes inescapable in the eyes of anyone who isn’t completely enamoured with it. The perfect illustration of this comes at the very end of the game, when you realise it doesn’t even let you skip the ending credits in order for you to get the final achievement. There’s a level of self-aggrandising here that I’m just not comfortable with as a player. Add to this a predictable ending, an overarching message that seems to arrive at the space too late to create any real impact, and a handful of technical problems (clunky movement, visual bugs, jarringly repetitive background dialogue, line delivery speeding up like crazy for no reason), and Harold Halibut almost looks like it goes out of its way to harm itself.

There are some genuinely enjoyable aspects to it, such as a positively phenomenal art style, an interesting premise, great voice acting, strongly heartwarming tones and some interesting music. But on the global enjoyment scale, these are sadly not enough to shift this game from okay (at best) to good, let alone great. I can’t shake the feeling that if this is the story they devs wanted to tell in the way they wanted to tell it, Harold Halibut would’ve been better suited for a different medium. 6/10