Editor's Note: The following demo review opportunity came courtesy of Tribeca Games. This title and other worthy competitors are vying for awards in the first-ever games category at the long-running festival. Please keep in mind that these reviews are based on demos, all of which vary in length from 20 minutes to an hour, and are not necessarily fully representative of the final, finished game. Our intent is to give you a sense of what makes these games unique, how well the games executed the developers' vision, and to put them on your radar before everyone you know is playing them.
As the former Animation lead for Collider, I've watched a lot of stop-motion animation, like, a lot. From Aardman, to LAIKA, to Stoopid Buddy Stoodios and beyond, I've probably seen everything from classic claymation to the most advanced puppetry in the world, often up-close-and-personal like. But I've honestly never seen a game quite like Harold Halibut, the upcoming entry from Slow Bros. that featured in this year's first-ever Tribeca Games competition. If the panel had awarded a prize for the most visually impressive and unique title, Harold Halibut would have won, hands down.
Check out the quirky trailer to get a sense of Harold Halibut, and be sure to wishlist the game on Steam:
Harold Halibut is a handmade narrative game about friendship, and life on a city-sized spaceship submerged in an alien ocean.
It’s been 250 years since your home - an ark-like spaceship - fled an Earth on the verge of cold war to find a habitable planet on which to preserve the human race. You are Harold, a young lab assistant for the ship’s lead scientist, Jeanne Mareaux. While most of the ship’s inhabitants have reconciled themselves to a life lived aboard the sunken ship, Mareaux still works tirelessly to find a way for the ship to leave the planet and find a new, dryer home.
But of course the weird, wonderful and diverse people of the Fedora keep Harold busy too. Until one fateful encounter plunges Harold into a new world that nobody could have guessed existed - and one that may hold the key to Mareaux’s re-launch plans.
Join Harold as he explores a vibrant retro-future world, talks (with full voice acting) to its inhabitants, and occasionally goes hands on by sticking screwdrivers in things, operating complex machinery, and more in his quest to find the true meaning of ‘home’.
That synopsis should tell you everything you need to know about the game's plot, but to really get a grasp of the gameplay experience, you simply have to get your hands on it. Harold Halibut is probably the only game I've ever played where a very floaty sense of movement controls actually adds to the bizarre nature of the whole setup. You're essentially controlling a puppet whose strings have been cut, so there's a bit of a delay to be expected in the movement tech, a feeling of sort of "catching up," as it were. It's hilarious. You're practically flinging Harold from one room to the next in the side-scrolling adventure game. And while trying to find the right angle to shove Harold through a door will almost certainly get frustrating in the overall game, for the short demo, it was pure delight.
Harold himself is equally delightful and charming in all the wrong ways. He's an everyman, a handyman for the suboceanic world of Fedora, a man with a particular association with fish that isn't explained in the demo, and a man unlucky in love, as the other residents of the sunken city are all too happy to remind him. That's done in such a way as to make you feel a bit sorry for Harold but also laugh along with the quirky characters who fill out the supporting cast.
In what's very nearly a stop-motion point-and-click adventure, you'll navigate Harold through the various levels of Fedora (via hilariously leaky water-filled transport tubes) in order to solve mini-mysteries and complete fetch quests for the denizens of the deep. I never thought I wanted Douglas Adams' take on the central story of BioShock, as told through the puppetry stylings of Team America: World Police, but here we are. You'll patch up fractured relationships, track a thief or two, and inadvertently get to the bottom of the city's most perilous problems. Just don't expect anyone to thank you in the process or even remember your name while doing it. Such is the lot of Harold Halibut's life, a somewhat dopey protagonist you just can't help but root for.
Harold Halibut can't arrive soon enough to help freshen up the current slate of same-looking games. So if you've been waiting for something decidedly different, keep an eye on the upcoming Slow Bros. title.