Harold Halibut, the stop-motion sci-fi game that has been in the works for 14 years (!) finally came out this week. I initially downloaded thePC Game Passversion on my laptop because, hey, it’s free (kind of). But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that this was a game worth playing on the biggest screen possible with the best hardware possible. So I dropped $31.52 for thePS5version and am giving Harold Halibut the triple-A treatment.
That was the right choice. As nice as it is to have access to a game through PC Game Pass, my laptop is four years old and just can’t run new games the way it used to. And for Harold Halibut — as much as forFinal Fantasy 7 RebirthorThe Last of Us Part 2 Remastered— the graphics are the draw.
An Indie Aesthetic For The Ages
That might seem like a strange thing to say about anindie gamethat retails for less than half as much as those heavy hitters. But there have been games that looked like FF7R and TLOU2, but slightly worse, and there will be games that look like them, but slightly better, down the road. There has never been a game that looks like Harold Halibut, and given the sheer amount of time it took to ship it, I doubt we’ll see another team attempt this kind of game anytime soon.
I mentioned that Harold Halibut was stop-motion above, but it’s easy to skim past those words without really internalizing what they entail. The game’s creators at Slow Bros. had to make every character, object, and set in the real world, then scan each of them into the game. Making a stop-motion movie is already a time-consuming process. To make a scene come to life, animators need to photograph each minute motion the character performs. Each time their lips move? That’s a new photograph. Any time they move their hands? That’s a new photograph — maybe several depending on how sweeping the motion is. It’s a ridiculously painstaking art form. Now, combine the attention to detail animation requires with the length of a video game.
Environments And Characters From Harold Halibut
A Long Haul For Harold Halibut
The result is Harold Halibut has pulled off a visual achievement as impressive as anything I’ve ever played.Cupheadis the only real comparison point. Each movement in that game needed to be hand drawn, and it took seven years for Studio MDHR to finish development as a result. These kinds of animation are obviously possible, but both are more time-consuming than working with computer-generated images. In hand-drawn animation and stop-motion, each movement must be drawn or performed individually. In CG animation, artists spend a long time creating a character model but don’t have to recreate that model for each frame. The character needs to be rigged to perform its actions, but it doesn’t need to be drawn again or physically posed.
The difficulty of the process alone doesn’t make a work of art worthwhile. Pushing a boulder up a hill for all of eternity might be an extremely hard task, but I doubt Sisyphus was selling out shows in the underworld. Harold Halibut is the result of a painstaking process but, more importantly, it looks terrific. I love entering a new area and studying the posters on the walls, the furniture decorating the space, or the people posed around it. It demands attention because attention has clearly been paid.
Slow Bros. also seems more than willing to spend time on digressions. While playing today, a shopkeeper wanted to get my opinion on a commercial for his store and when he pressed play, the ad went for a full minute or two, filled with shots that I will never see again in that playthrough. There’s a soap opera playing in the lounge, and there are multiple arcade games to play. It’s so filled with things to see and do that I can’t help but be swept up in the labor of love.
