Harold Halibut places you within the footwear of a lowly upkeep employee aboard a spaceship submerged underwater. To the residents aboard the ship, Harold is a relatively charming, lovable, even dopey fellow who’s endearing for his simplicity and his complacency in doing his job. Harold is tasked with eradicating graffiti, cleansing, and fixing machines, and when the work is completed, his day ends, he goes to sleep, he wakes up–rinse, repeat. That is the floor of Harold, however tucked out of sight from individuals’s view, is a personality who’s deceivingly introspective, typically documenting his life by means of scribbled pictures in a notepad, or expressing himself by means of playful theatrics when he is alone, like singing and performing operatically whereas mopping up a filter system. This can be a facet of the character solely we, the participant, get to see. As a personality, Harold is advanced, even when he would not totally perceive how. He makes an attempt to query and discover his curiosity and his personal existence throughout the confines of a spaceship he was born and raised on, however he is not at all times able to understanding precisely what he is on the lookout for.
Harold Halibut, the sport, is very similar to its titular character: It is charming and lovable on the floor for its distinctive handmade aesthetic and charmingly easy gameplay. However simply beneath that uncomplicated layer is a narrative that makes an attempt to ask questions on introspection and self-worth, even when the sport would not at all times really feel geared up to reply them or perceive its strongest fits.
Harold Halibut does an unimaginable job in exploring its many themes and ideas by placing a magnifying glass on its setting. The FEDORA is a spaceship that was designed to go away Earth in the course of the Chilly Conflict and set forth on a 200-year journey to hunt a brand new planet to stay on, however the brand new world it discovered was devoid of any landmass. With nowhere to go, the FEDORA crashes onto the planet, plunging its occupants into the watery depths, which they’ve realized to colonize. In the meantime, Harold’s mentor and resident scientist, Mareaux, makes an attempt to discover a energy supply to launch the ship again into area to discover a extra appropriate planet to stay on.
Within the meantime, as Harold, you interweave by means of the lives of the FEDORA’s inhabitants, the ship’s politics, and its internal workings. It is a monotonous course of that entails checking off Harold’s duties on his PDA-like machine, as you progress by means of his day-to-day life within the quirky retro-future spaceship. However Harold’s life takes an abrupt flip after discovering a humanoid fish-like being has boarded the ship, creating a complete new perspective on the planet they’ve, in truth, been sharing all these years. It is on this second that Harold’s seemingly monotonous life is turned on its head, inspiring curiosity in what lies past the one world he is ever recognized.
Harold Halibut is hanging in its visuals as a result of it is totally handmade. Characters, articles of clothes, items of furnishings, teapots, mugs, floorboards, and the whole lot else was handmade in our actual world and digitally scanned into the 3D recreation. Its visuals immediately distinguish Harold Halibut as one of the vital visually fascinating video games of the 12 months. However whereas it is easy to get swept up within the awe of its look, the strongest attribute of the sport is the world itself and the characters inside it.
Harold Halibut is totally centered on exploration, conversational selections, and the occasional challenge-free minigame. At its core, Harold Halibut is targeted on the world and the characters that inhabit it, which, story apart, is the place the sport is at its finest. Whilst you might play as Harold, it is the characters you work together with who give the sport a way of intimacy and, over time, a sense of density that reveals there’s really so much going on–these are the sport’s largest achievement.
Throughout my 18 hours, I met almost two dozen characters, every with their very own story to unpack, and I beloved all of them. Greater than the invention of an alien species, or the urgency to discover a energy supply for the ship, my largest motivation was to get to know every individual aboard the FEDORA. Whether or not it was the comical musings of the sports activities retailer proprietor Slippie, or the by-the-book Main who enforces the ship’s legal guidelines, every character is multifaceted, with deep personalities to study, discover, and oftentimes see challenged.
Whereas more often than not spent with these characters is totally elective, the sport’s most vital and consequential moments, each hilarious and heart-wrenching, begin and finish with the residents of FEDORA. The conversations can really feel inconsequential within the grand scheme of the sport’s plot, however are invaluable to creating this handmade world really feel alive and lived in.
With the abundance of characters additionally comes a determined must hold monitor of them. Early in my time with the sport, earlier than I had turn into properly acquainted with the forged of characters, I used to be typically confused with who was who and the place they have been situated. The sport’s lack of waypoints was to its profit, nonetheless, as this saved me engaged in utilizing the ship’s indicators to navigate its many sectors, but in addition higher study and bear in mind these characters, as I might with individuals in actual life. Nevertheless, these early phases additionally created pointless friction by inflicting me to bumble round and waste time. This might have been alleviated with the addition of an in-game glossary to remind me who’s who that would have existed in Harold’s PDA.
Every character is as distinct of their seems to be as they’re their views on life–even with the shared perspective of dwelling within the confines of a small colony underwater. It is their tales that provides the FEDORA believability and lends the sport a prevailing coronary heart and soul that overshadows all the recreation’s different plotlines. However its achievement of making a wealthy forged of characters additionally offers rise to struggles in correctly exploring them underneath the load of its different story ambitions.
Apart from the ideas and emotions of its very broad forged of characters is an abundance of concepts and narratives driving the primary plot. These vary from unpacking a company’s ulterior motives, to a secret society lurking within the shadows, to the urgency to find an influence supply for the FEDORA. And whereas they’re little doubt vital to inform an overarching story, they really feel like concepts which can be too massive for the dollhouse-sized nature of Harold Halibut.
As Harold’s world aboard a spaceship begins to collide with the alien world he is been dwelling on, he makes mates with the planet’s inhabitants, that are often called the Flumuylum. The fish-like humanoids’ philosophies are a whole distinction to that of people, although additionally just about what you’d think about what it will be like if fish have been people: a species that merely floats alongside by means of life, present and observing, giving little to no which means to something. This mentality crashes head-on with Harold’s on a regular basis existence: a life that boils all the way down to routinely taking orders and doing what different individuals anticipate of him, typically in service of the ship’s corporation-based ethos and in adherence to arbitrary guidelines like having a curfew or paying for its water tube transportation system. The duality between Harold’s and the Flumuylum’s lives are juxtaposed for a number of hours within the recreation, till Harold is compelled right into a crash course in existentialism in the direction of the latter half of the sport, inflicting him to query whether or not or not he was ever in charge of his personal life. The scene was a tonal whiplash as the sport made a tough flip to reply questions that it had solely simply begun to ask, and in doing so, felt extra clunky than enlightening.
Harold’s abrupt journey of introspection is sandwiched on high of and between the tales and ideologies of different characters, in addition to the sport’s overarching plots and conspiracies. Nobody thought or theme felt prefer it had the respiration room it wanted or deserved, which implies they will really feel extra like fleeting considerations as an alternative of meals for thought. For instance, one scene hints at themes of the industrialization, air pollution, and consumption of animal merchandise by the human race, solely to by no means confer with it once more, and even arrange a satisfying throughline for its goal within the first place.
In making an attempt to weave its characters, story, and themes collectively, I discovered its focus to turn into muddled. With such an emphasis on all its characters, and by making them an integral a part of the sport’s core expertise, Harold finally ends up being the one character that has a considerable narrative arc–he sees his world by means of the lens of a mere errand boy however has his world turned the wrong way up, making a perspective that provides his life extra which means by the tip. However in spending the time to do that, the sport, in flip, leaves many threads for the opposite characters I had grown connected to feeling unfulfilled. By the point the climatic finish unfolds, I used to be much less within the conspiracies behind the occasions that transpired and extra centered on the expansion of the characters.
Harold Halibut is at its strongest when intimately exploring its characters, their internal workings, and their relationships with each other. However in making an attempt to construct in the direction of a dramatic conclusion, lots of the hours spent fostering relationships with the characters took a backseat to plotlines that have been much less fascinating.
To cite one of many recreation’s personal characters, Buddy the mailman, “every individual aboard this ship is a world their very own.” In a narrative a few man trapped on a ship, who’s making an attempt to grasp himself higher, their lives and views ought to be a very powerful tales to inform for Harold’s journey. Harold Halibut’s world and the those that inhabit it have been actually crafted by those that cared about him and his story. And whereas that story struggles underneath the load of its ambitions, the human touches on each a part of it are evident. These are the guts and soul of the sport, and so they imprinted on me too.