Introduction
Hey folks, Duncan here! Today I bring you a review of Harold Halibut on the Xbox, I hope you enjoy!
Harold Halibut is very much a story driven game, with the main character Harold, trying to fit in with various characters, whilst trying to remember how to do his job aboard the Fedora 1, an explorer spaceship two hundred and fifty years after it crashed on an alien planet and sunk searching for an alternative place for humans to live, in case that the cold war gets a little bit too hot. From developers Slow Bros, this Claymation styled game, uses hand crafted models, and stop motion filming to depict its story and surroundings, in an impressive way.
As impressed as I was by the art style and how it was made, this probably wouldn’t be a game I would have normally played. With it being on the Xbox Game Pass, I would have maybe watched the trailer and thought to myself, “That looks cool, so I’ll give it a try and see how it goes!”. The dry and sarcastic sense of humour from the characters did get more than a few chuckles out of me, but there were certainly parts in the early parts of the game where it got slightly monotonous, before redeeming itself slightly later.
The characters really stand out in this game and Harold’s interactions with them are where most of the jokes and laughs come from as Harold is a bit of a dope and the others all have an interesting list of quirks!
Plot
Two hundred and fifty years ago, the Fedora 1 left earth on the brink of an escalating cold war, to find a new home and resources for humanity. After reaching their destination they found that unfortunately, their target planet wasn’t hospitable, and the atmosphere of the planet caused the ship to crash and sink to the bottom of the ocean.
In this game Harold is a general maintenance man, going about his day to day, fixing and cleaning things aboard the ship and helping the onboard scientist Professor Jeanne Moreaux, maintain the ship and collecting samples for her experiments, including finding a place to live outside of the ship or trying to find a new power source to free the ship from its watery confines.
When an alien life form boards the ship, the possibility of life outside of its confines become more and more realistic. As the idea of life outside of the ship becomes reality, things take an interesting turn in ways you wouldn’t expect.
From maintaining your current home to building a new one Harold will stumble on to something unexpected! As the crew and citizens of the Fedora 1 adapt to new possibilities.
Graphics
As I’ve mentioned all the character models are hand crafted, and moved around using stop motion, they are then digitally scanned to be rendered into the game. This is no mean feat, and it works well for the most part, only very rarely do limbs clip through the characters own bodies, or character models through scenery. I did notice once or twice that mouth movement and the characters voice did slip out of sync, although that may have been me looking a bit too closely for slip ups. But overall, I think this game is impressive to look at and the amount of effort required to get it that way is certainly to be commended!
Gameplay
The gameplay is relatively simple and the game itself runs decently, I personally didn’t come across too many bugs or glitches, asides from the ones I mentioned in the previous graphics section. Most of the time you are moving to a certain place and interacting with a specific objective. There are a couple of minigames in the arcade room on the ship which are simple and fun. The game did become slightly dull at times with there being a lot of going backwards and forwards, but the story is just about interesting enough to keep going. I think what the game struggles with is that it is trying to answer questions that are too big in scope for a game with such simple mechanics and not much world interactivity.
With all the different characters thrown in too, the games message can sometimes come across a little muddled with so many different ideals and personalities. Trying to put an equal emphasis on each character does weigh the game down a little even though a fair few are quite interesting, I found it hard to keep up with everyone, on top of following the story and the games’ themes.
Soundtrack
I personally enjoyed the soundtrack and felt like it enhanced the emotional beats in the games story as well as helped create an atmosphere to occasionally bland surroundings and some of the seemingly endless going from point A to B and back again.
Development
This game was a long time coming as you can imagine with all the models and the style of animation used, 14 years in fact! From what I can find there’s not a lot of behind-the-scenes footage or developer diaries, which is a shame really, because I bet it was quite an interesting project to work on.
Value for money
This game is currently on Xbox Gamepass, so Xbox gamers at least, get to play it as part of that! It starts off as a bit of a slow burn at times, but the characters and some of the questions asked in the games themes and throughout the story do make for some interesting head scratchers! I was surprised by the sense of humour in this game. It’s dry, straight-faced delivery of some of the lines and jokes did make me chuckle out loud on occasion.
The variety of quirky characters also make the game more interesting, even though, at times, trying to figure out where they are on the ship can almost feel like hard work.
For me personally it is a good Game Pass game, it’s interesting enough that I might want to dip in and out of every so often, but I’m not sure it’s a kind of game I would go out my way to buy and spend the full eighteen hours on.
Final Thoughts
There were times that I had fun with it, but I think it was trying to ask too many deep and meaningful questions, with no real way of answering them in a satisfying way and having so many characters to check in on, does weigh it down somewhat too.
Harold Halibut is available now on Xbox Series X|S/ Xbox Game Pass, PlayStation 4/5, and Steam
GAMERHUB RATING: 3.5 (Out of FIVE) JOYSTICKS
(Thank you to Monica from popagenda, and the team at Slow Bros for providing the code for this review)
