Harold Halibut is a beautiful, plodding journey under the sea.
Harold Halibut is a handcrafted, stop motion game telling the story of Harold, a filter maintenance worker aboard the Fedora 1, a generation ship stranded beneath an alien sea. It’s a slow-paced game somewhere between a “walking simulator” and an adventure game, though there isn’t much in the way of puzzles. Harold Halibut is gorgeous, masterfully crafted, and full of character and flavor. Sometimes it’s funny, sometimes it’s painful, and sometime it’s thoughtful. Hiding under the handmade dolls and dioramas is a beautiful, evocative story that takes a bit too long to get to the good part.
I want to get this out of the way now so I can talk about the good stuff, but I think that Harold Halibut isn’t a very fun game most of the time. It’s a great story that goes places, but the actual gameplay isn’t the most rewarding. You spend most of the game aboard the Fedora completing fetch quests and errands for the odd residents, but over time Harold becomes central to solving some of the Fedora’s larger mysteries. Completing these small quests require a ton of backtracking through most of the same (beautifully rendered) environments to press A on character. Multiple quests involve talking to one person, being asked to get help from another, that second person refuses, then you return to the first person and don’t worry it’s not a problem actually.
Those first two chapters specifically feel lost from a pacing perspective and multiple times almost turned me off from the game completely. I ultimately spent 14 hours playing Harold Halibut, many of which dragged on. However, about halfway through, the pace picks up and the story kicks off in a fun way.
The characters you run into are all quirky and odd, very reminiscent of side characters in a Wes Andersen movie. In a game where the only thing you do is converse, I enjoyed how well-written and acted the conversations were and, by the end, I was pretty invested in some of the storylines. My personal favorite (and I suspect the writers’ of the game as well) is Buddy, the fitness-obsessed, friendly postman. Buddy is one of only a handful that isn’t typically putting Harold down (more on that later), instead he’s kind and welcoming.
One of my favorite quests involves returning to Buddy and reading through ancient letters that couldn’t be delivered. I looked forward to meeting with him and listening to his reflections on what it must’ve been like hurtling through space. The letters ranged from lost connections to planetary journal entries, but each of them made the Fedora feel real and less farcical than it appeared.
During the early hours of Harold Halibut, I struggled to figure out what tone the game was trying to achieve. The hallways of the dioramas were cramped, the water outside lit in an eerie green glow, and no one really seemed to like Harold. Much of the first three chapters, I kept waiting for the game to reveal what it was about: was this a warm story of a maintenance person saving the world, or was it a foreboding tale of a trapped society? Maybe it was just me, but there was this foreboding sense that something was going to happen, since so little was occurring at the start.
Midway through chapter 1, the Fedora receives a rather awkward message from Earth that everything is fine and they figured out their differences. Everyone seems to take the news of being flung into space generations ago for seemingly no reason pretty well. This message, along with an ongoing energy crisis, spurs the scientist characters around Harold into action to relaunch the Fedora from its resting place below the sea. Harold, for most of the game, is just along for the ride completing small jobs for the people actually saving the ship (and being chastised throughout).
Playing through the first couple hours, I kept wondering if this game would make a better movie than game. Everything about Harold Halibut looks and feels like a LAIKA Studios movie or more modern Wallace and Gromit. Having finished it though, I really don’t think so. It is important for the player to experience the way each character treats Harold; when a character berates Harold for being absentminded or slow, it feels like that’s just as much the character’s fault as mine. Harold’s blandness and listlessness in a game with so many oddball characters has a cathartic conclusion that makes all the drudgery worth it…but it is drudgery.
It’s not all fetch quests and conversations though, from chapter three onward, there are so many incredible out-of-nowhere moments that propelled me onward. If you’re leaving before the spoilers, I’ll leave you with this: I recommend Harold Halibut if you have the patience for a 12-15 hour game that really hits its stride around hour 4 or 5. There’s a good story here with some really fun standout moments that I think are worth experiencing. If you’re looking for gameplay or efficient storytelling, this one isn’t for you (and maybe just read on to know what you’re missing). Harold Halibut is charming, odd, and above all, a story about finding home.
Harold’s main job is as apprentice to Professor Jeanne Mareaux, the ship’s all-around smart person. You begin playing as Harold after being fined for an out-of-date transit ticket. After your fine is paid by Professor Mareaux and you get a dressing down for being so absentminded, you return to the Lab District and do your primary job: cleaning the filters. You’ll return to the filter section multiple times, each visit odder than the next. It’s a really evocative location that no one else visits, you’re own sanctum bathed in radioactive green.
On your first visit to the filters, you clean them and go about your day. After a few more days worth of insults from your peers, you return to the filters to clean them again. This second visit is when I began to turn around on Harold Halibut. You complete the same button command as you did the first time, but the game takes control from you and Harold steps into the filter to clean it…then bursts into song. It’s a Broadway-esque “want” song about needing more to life than cleaning, fixing, and running around, complete with pirouettes, operatic gestures, and vibrato.
The third visit to the filters, you find a humanoid fish body from a species completely unknown to the Fedora crew. The remainder of chapters three and four involve nursing this alien back to health, becoming friends, and visiting their home. Weeoo (the alien’s name) is a great character and her storyline introduces some vibrancy and a change of scenery into Harold’s life. She is kind, thoughtful, and provides a much needed outsider view to the Fedora, Harold, and human life in general.
If you’ve made it this far and you haven’t been convinced to give the game a go, I’ll end with this. I was feeling mixed on Harold Halibut until chapter five (of six), when this game soared up my list for the year. The entirety of chapter five is a surreal unraveling of Harold’s mind with reality TV style interstitial “couch” segments packed with philosophical meanderings. Through a series of short, surreal vignettes, the game unspools ten hours of repetitive backtracking and the constant belittling of Harold and provides a satisfying, beautiful exploration of Harold and his feelings.
