Harold Halibut Review
A game that has lots of promise and contains some great features, but without enough interaction and pace to make it a classic.
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67%
Summary
Harold Halibut is a game that I was looking forward to playing for a good few months, as it had quite a lot of hype from being a pretty unique game in terms of using a stop motion graphical style throughout.
It also involved an interesting premise of a spaceship from Earth having crashed into an ocean on an alien planet, complete with a water tube transport system to get you around the ship. It sounded AMAZING!
However, within a few minutes of gameplay it quickly turned from being an amazing concept into a very, very slow game with limited actions to undertake and almost non-existent levels of interaction and brain-power required to wander very slowly through the whole thing. And when I say ‘wander very slowly’ I’m not exaggerating. There is soooooo much wandering from one location to another and then back again that Harold’s painfully slow walking style (even after I had discovered his painfully slow jogging style) really grates on you very quickly.
The length of some of the conversations between characters was too much for me too. I love a narrative game that tells a great story, but even I was pulling what is left of my hair out at times with some of the dialogue. Luckily you can skip through a lot of it, but it kind of feels like you’re cheating if you do that!
It’s a shame, as the concept is really rather unique, the storytelling is great and the stop motion graphics look genuinely impressive. You can feel that a lot of time and effort and love has gone into creating this game. It’s just a shame that the time and effort doesn’t really translate into a great game because with a few tweaks and a bit more interaction it could have been something special.
There are some great parts in there. There’s a really trippy section called Chasing The Dragon which is full of colour and drama and general weirdness, and the ending to the game overall is nicely done, but there are just too many slow, ‘walking simulator’ sections of the game to make it genuinely exciting to play. As it stands, it’s a game that is worth playing through once, but not one that will pull you back into a second attempt.
Fortunately it’s currently available on Xbox and PC Game Pass so you can give it a go for free and see if you like it. Played on PC Game Pass.