Harold Halibut, served as an entrée this time
A deep, erm... dive into the narrative adventure from Slow Bros. that dropped sometime last month
Review: Harold Halibut
Developed and published by Slow Bros.
Rating: ★★★★★★★★☆☆
A couple of weeks ago, I discovered Harold Halibut. In the time since, while the captivating art style, delightful characters and soothing score have remained as appealing (and more importantly, constant) as ever, something has astonished me greatly. And we’ll get to that shortly.
I went into this ‘handmade narrative game about friendship and life’ with few preconceived notions. Being a narrative adventure, I wasn’t expecting overly complex gameplay loops, nor was I hoping for large-scale exercises in traversal and exploration. I was prepared for minor bugs, glitches and all manner of audiovisual gremlins. And finally, I was willing to accept a four- to five-hour playthrough.
Now, as I’d briefly mentioned in an earlier post (linked above), Harold Halibut is the tale of the titular handyman’s attempt to find a sense of belonging amidst his people’s quest to find a new home for humanity. The backstory is that Earth on the verge of collapse, and you’re aboard a spacecraft known as the Fedora that has landed on an aquatic planet in its search for a place in the galaxy to settle.
Following its arrival on the aquatic planet, the Fedora has been transformed into a sort of underwater city complete with restaurants, a bar, stores, a school, a videogame arcade and so on. And within this new world, Harold is tasked with cleaning out filtration tanks, feeding fish, wiping away mischievous graffiti and other such tasks. But Harold is a happy-go-lucky guy, willing to perform all his duties with a smile on his face and an ever-present childlike wonder about him.
And it’s in capturing this childlike wonder — particularly in Harold’s mannerisms — that Slow Bros. has done a fantastic job. It’s been widely reported (and stated by the devs themselves) that the game has been in the making for 14 years and from the looks of things, it was well worth every minute in the oven. Sure, the faces of characters aren’t quite as expressive as you might like, but that’s part of the charm of Harold Halibut.
Becoming Harold
We start things off being reprimanded by a figure of authority — something you’ll be seeing a lot of as time goes on. And it’s within that first interaction when Harold’s dynamic with the world around him is established: He is the well-meaning simpleton, bumbling through life aboard the Fedora, and frequently falling afoul of authority (but rarely intentionally). It’s also our first run-in with Professor Jeanne Mareaux, researcher at whose pleasure Harold serves a lab assistant.
Every so often, it is mildly refreshing to play a game where you aren’t viewed as some sort of messiah, saviour, or heroic figure with all the answers. Instead, you are treated on occasion with contempt, at other times with derision or simply being put down. In fact, in the opening hours (perhaps even the first half), it’s rare to find Harold being spoken to respectfully or in a complimentary manner. Now when I said it’s ‘refreshing’, I didn’t mean necessarily in a positive way; rather it’s like a palate cleanser (or reality check, if you will) between games that see heaps of obeisance paid to you, the main character.
And perhaps it is this feeling of being — for want of a better word — a ‘loser’ that drives the entire story forward. It’s possible that the redemptive arc (not so much Harold’s own as that of those around him) would be less poignant if he started off as a well-respected member of society. That isn’t to say that the condescension he experiences is of the mean-spirited or nasty variety, not at all. It’s subtle, but it’s omnipresent.
Through it all, Harold is in the midst of his own crisis of belonging that gradually tilts towards, and then all of a sudden explodes into a full-blown existential crisis in the game’s fascinating third act. A large part of Harold Halibut’s storytelling can be found in the way the game manages the mood of a scene — ably reinforced by the background music and Harold’s ability to emote in the absence of demonstrative expressions.
The meat and (fish) bones
Having come to terms with and then embraced life as Harold, there are a handful of gameplay loops you will experience. And this is par for the course for a narrative adventure. After all, in the absence of combat, there needs to be something to keep a narrative adventure from turning into a visual novel, right? Right. And in that regard, Harold Halibut manages to strike a great balance between walking and a variety of minigames (ranging from the utterly mundane like working the filtration system to the rather more entertaining like the flying games in the arcade).
Here, I was most impressed by the thought put into the activities (some are too tiny to be even called minigames). For starters, never (aside possibly from Death Stranding) have fetch quests seemed so appropriate, because those are exactly the sort of tasks I would imagine a lab assistant/handyman is given on a spacecraft-cum-city that is at the bottom of the ocean on an aquatic planet. On the other hand, the flying game is an excellent way to foreshadow an activity that takes place towards the tail end of the game. The rest is a sprinkling of little distractions to make Harold’s life slightly less mundane.
And this is key because Harold’s life is mundane, of that there can be no doubt. Harold Halibut is, as you’ll discover over the course of the game, as much a minimal life sim featuring our protagonist as it is a journey into turning the mundane magical. To elaborate, what begins as a fairly basic point and click game suddenly transforms into a far more ambitious experience, before taking a sharp left turn into the surreal and truly batshit.
And through all of the strangeness of the final laps of the game, the gameplay remains solid with various perspective changes, new means of traversal and new activities blending seamlessly into the staple gameplay of Harold Halibut. As I’ve observed on numerous occasions in the past (including yet another diatribe at Elden Ring), even the most fantastic gameplay mechanics and loops fall flat in the absence of motivation. And motivation is one thing with which Harold Halibut is chock-full.
This isn’t a fast-paced, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it narrative. As a matter of fact, it’s a rather relaxed, lilting and comfortable story that you’ll be able to ruminate over and reflect on, even as it’s playing out in front of you. The manner in which the events of the game are able to play with its languorous pace is a credit to the storytelling and world-building. I don’t want to get into the story too much, because it’ll ruin it for you, but needless to say, the magical yet restrained, compelling yet cosy nature of storytelling and plot progression was greatly appreciated by me, a self-proclaimed aficionado of narrative adventures.
What sticks in the throat
At the top of the piece, I’d noted that something took me quite by surprise (actually, I said it ‘astonished me greatly’) and that I’d get to it in some time. Well, that time is now. And it was the length of the game that really amazed me. As I’d also mentioned, I was perfectly happy to play a four- or five-hour game that told a simple story of a day in this handyman’s life. There’d be enough time to get a glimpse into his daily chores, his relations with others onboard the ship, perhaps a bit of conflict, maybe even a love interest, and finally a resolution to the day (or even a non-resolution). Told well enough, it’d be a tale I’d lap up happily.
But Harold Halibut decides to go in a very different direction. It took me just over 16 hours to complete the game (including almost all side content), and I’m pleased to report that not once did I look at my watch or any other timekeeping device. Overall, while the plot and the gameplay was, for the most part, well-paced and well-executed respectively, the writing was a whole different story.
— “Do you think we’re somewhere?”
— “I don’t think we’re nowhere.”
It was around the time I heard these lines that my patience had well and truly frayed with the writing. For all its positives (just look, for instance, at the details painstakingly applied to that wall above), the dialogue veers between being too clever by half and the sort of stuff that makes you wonder if the writer’s ever heard two people speak. If this sounds harsh, let me elaborate. There are three scenarios in which this sticks out most starkly.
The first is when Harold is joking with another character or vice versa. Rarely is a joke ever left out there to live and breathe. Instead, it gets suffocated under a barrage of exposition and over-explanation. The second is when the game decides to lay science on you. If you think the exposition is suffocating during jokes, prepare to strap on an oxygen tank when the characters slip into science mode. For the most part, the excess of theory adds little to the overall story and the knowledge helps you in absolutely no way over the course of the game.
The third is a phenomenon seen in the last stretch of the game when Harold is having an existential crisis of some sort. Again, I want you to experience the story for yourself and so, am staunchly steering clear of telling you what said crisis entails. Instead of a clear articulation of Harold’s predicament or his discussions about it with other characters, the big payoff is buried under lines that seem to go on forever. A break during which the player can reflect on these thoughts would’ve been greatly appreciated. This is an even bigger shame considering the deftness in terms of moderation and restraint shown when writing even the most emotional of scenes. I would certainly not call the game’s writing bad, because it is of a high quality. It’s just that it can be extremely clunky and overbearing at times.
Catch of the day?
You bet!
As much as I have cribbed about the writing, it feels like no more than a blemish in hindsight, and as I sit back to reminisce on what was overall an incredibly polished game with nary a glitch or bug in sight. Whether you enjoy being told a story about finding oneself in a quest to find a home, you’re a fan of stylish art design, or you find yourself somewhere in the middle, there’s something in Harold Halibut for all fans of narrative adventures. Go check it out!
Game Pass version of the game reviewed on Xbox Series X
In closing…
The past week has largely been spent playing the Hangar 13-developed and 2K Games-published TopSpin 2K25. Coming around 27 years since my first brush with a tennis sim (I’m not including Tennis on the Nintendo Entertainment System in this analysis), it’s been interesting seeing the ways in which the genre has evolved over the years and the ways in which it’s stayed the same.
You can expect to read a review of the game next week. But for now, you’ll have to make do with this trailer: