4/5 ★ – pinksteady's review of Harold Halibut.

I had been looking forward to playing this for a long, long time. Every now and then a game comes along that does something new, or at least something rare, and it offers a unique experience. Harold Halibut is one of those games. It is certainly not without its flaws, and overall it was actually quite hard to finish due to its length and pace, but I am so pleased I persevered. The depth of this game probably surpasses my ability to articulate, but I guess I’ll give it a go! And weirdly, despite me feeling very moved by the experience, I suspect a lot of people will play this and find it incredibly boring. It focuses heavily on world and character-building, storytelling, and emotional exploration, but this often comes at the expense of gameplay and ‘fun’. But I am left with a feeling similar to when I have been engrossed in a book, sinking into that world and then feeling just a tiny bit of emptiness once it is over. The visuals and story Let’s start with the basics. First off is the look of the game. Everything you see was built in real life and then digitally scanned and animated. I don’t fully understand the process, but it looks incredible. There’s something about knowing that the character you are playing, the room you are in, and everything you see was made in real life by real people. And not only that, but the environments are gorgeous. Everything is detailed and thick with atmosphere.  You play Harold, a quiet, well-meaning and undervalued assistant to a scientist in a crashed spaceship that is stranded underwater on a remote planet. The crew have together settled here, making a new home. The game involves you exploring the various areas of the ship and building relationships with the inhabitants. Everyone has a story to tell, and challenges that you can help with. So you spend a lot of time talking and listening, and helping your crewmates with their own personal struggles. As time passes, you realise that your own needs are taking a back seat, and so we begin to witness Harold evolve, and live up to untapped potential as he becomes pivotal in creating a plan to relaunch the ship and return home. The development of each relationship in the game, the evolution of how Harold is treated by others, and how he treats himself, is heartwarming. Eventually you make contact with a native sentient species on the planet, and the game opens up, showing you a whole new alien world and new characters. Here, Harold finds what can only be described as love, but with an alien, and so it is a very pure and simple love. The alien doesn’t share the concept, and probably neither does Harold, but together they form a bond that changes them both forever.  It was fulfilling to watch how each character evolves, both in terms of their own journey, but also how they related to and treated Harold. Everyone is on a journey, and somehow the most mundane of characters (Harold) manages to unite and inspire. The acting is superb all-round, with all (ok, most of) the characters believable and interesting. Gameplay...? And so that’s the main gist of the story-side of the game. This is the game’s strongest aspect by far, and points towards the stop-motion and storytelling credentials of the team that built it. Where the game falls short is in actual gameplay. Pretty much the entire game is walking to your next task (which is almost always speaking to someone), having a conversation, walking to the next person to talk to, often then walking back to the first person, and repeat. For 15 hours. I’m not even joking. This game is sloooooow. It took me a long time finish, not only because of how long it actually is, but because I often found it hard to motivate myself to carry on. Like I said, I’m really glad I did, but I am kind of confused about how lacking this game is in... gaming. My theory is that the team must be mostly real-world animators, trying their hand at making a game, but I haven’t been able to verify that. By way of example, one quest has you delivering about 6 letters to different people spread across the game world. You have to go to your room, collect the first letter, locate the person in any of the various areas, have a long chat with them, then walk back to your room to collect the next letter, and repeat. This takes forever. And it begs the question, why can’t you just pick up the whole pile?  There is nothing really to interact with in the game world. I started exploring every area as I normally would, then quickly realised this game does not do the “explore over here and find something new”. It is entirely linear. If your task is to go to a specific place, that’s what you do - exploring anywhere else will yield nothing new. This was disappointing, and made the game feel much more like a walking-sim than anything else. Because of the maturity of the storytelling, the game kind of gets away with it, but only just. There was an entire area of the game where literally nothing happens. But after every big scene change, I felt compelled to return just to check. These things disappointed me, but for whatever reason I feel obliged to give the team a break. The visual and storytelling feat they have pulled off is so impressive that I’m simply happy to have experienced it. I can’t ignore the fact that writing this article I miss the characters. I wonder how they are getting on. They were just so real. So there you have it. A wonderful, sensitive tale of self discovery and human nature, wrapped up into a beautiful if incredibly slow game. If that sounds good, then give it a try!