Indie Game of the Week 477: Harold Halibut

Harold Halibut felt like one of those games like South of Midnight where the early previews were jaw-dropping (and likewise caused much resulting chin-wagging, which is what jaws tend to do after they descend) and then the hype around it just kinda evaporated after it released. Having played quite a bit of it, I can sort of see where the deflation came from, but at the same time I don't think what it presented in those early showcase trailers is at all distinct from what it eventually became: a traditional point-and-click adventure with a slow-burn thriller narrative couched in a low-energy character comedy in the style of a Wes Anderson flick.

The Fedora might be a chaotic place from time to time, but I can think of other Sealabs that have it worse.

The titular Harold is a not particularly well-respected maintenance technician on the spaceship Fedora which, some five years prior, crashed into the alien planet it was meant to be escaping a war-torn Earth to colonize as a new start for humanity. Now occupying one of the planet's deeper oceans, the ship's crew embraced the change as well as they could and continued eking out the slow and subdued state of living they'd always had: it's only once the local corporate sponsors pulling the strings decided on a whim to send a radio buoy to the surface that various pungent materials hit the fan, with long-simmering resentments and the eccentric cast's collective cabin fever producing unpredictable consequences. Only the mild-mannered Harold, trapped in the middle of circumstances beyond his control like any good space janitor, remains unfazed and continues his usual cycle of clearing out filters and washing up graffiti as the madness mounts up around him.

The setting, genial if somewhat soul-crushing due to its overbearing bureaucratic guardians, doesn't immediately turn to abject bedlam. The story sort of operates on a day/night cycle, where during the evening the pneumatic tube travel system switches off to signal that it's time to return back to Harold's cabin to sleep, and once you awake events will have moved on and created new problems for you to deal with. It's somewhat similar to the first Gabriel Knight game (and possibly the sequels too; I never got around to those) where this "end of day" mechanic was a good sign that you were making progress, a trick potentially earned from Japanese adventure games where having accomplished your immediate goals the game's narrative switches to auto-pilot for a while almost in the manner of a reward for your diligence thus far. The game eschews inventory puzzles almost entirely for the sake of character interactions: typically a day will draw to an end once you've talked to the relevant people and accomplished whatever maintenance tasks were in your itinerary, progressing the story in bits and pieces in-between. It is a bit of a slow game and certainly an uneventful one for a while, given the goal early on is to establish the setting and its cast of characters (many of which are a little crabby with Harold, though there's a few equally good-natured bros in there like the Fabio-esque Chris or the exercise-obsessed postie Bobby), but even in its initial stages it feels like a story that's going to reward you for your patience.

That's... not how you do stairs. Do stairs more right, dang it. Neck injuries are on the line here.

The cottony elephant in the room here is, of course, the game's aesthetic. The characters resemble physical stop-motion puppetry while the backdrops similarly share a sort of physical verisimilitude like they were all miniatures made by hand. The developers then took these models, created digital equivalents, and animated them in-program rather than try to perform stop-motion directly which might detract from some of the fun but gives them a much more natural animation flow. It wasn't too long ago that I played a game that used a similar trick—Mason Lindroth's Hylics 2 (IGotW #463)—and given the effect is so striking in both I'm surprised it hasn't caught on more broadly. Whatever Wes Anderson-y vibe the game already had is amplified by this stop-motion approach, given Anderson also famously applied it to a couple of his movies (Fantastic Mr. Fox and Isle of Dogs); Harold Halibut almost feels like an alternative universe version of The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou had it used the same animation style and instead starred frequent Anderson player Adrien Brody if he was operating on three hours of sleep. The animation can lead to a few interesting quirks from time to time—I try to pointedly ignore the uncanny way the models attempt to walk up and down stairs—but it's otherwise dazzling and lends itself well to the material, as easygoing as it is.

I've not reached the game's conclusion quite yet but I've been digging what amount of it I've played, even if the main thrust of Halibut's "mission" so far has boiled down to yapping and custodial busywork. Video game narratives have come far enough now that they can afford to take it slow and smell the flowers from time to time, rather than try to maintain some implausible explosions-per-minute ratio, and Harold Halibut is content to draw you into its idiosyncratic, subaquatic world of identical triplet (or maybe quadruplet?) secretaries, "Captains-at-large" (a role that became as useless as Harold's after the ship sank), arcade operators that hate noisy children, descendants of upmarket ski clothing shop proprietors with no customers to sell to given the ship is carefully environmentally controlled, and Jamaican restaurateurs who can't be certain if their fish come from the ship's Earth-sourced hydropods or from the bizarre alien sealife that floats by the windows, sometimes holding signs put there by some unknown troublemaker. If you can appreciate its languid pace and really minimal amount of traditional adventure game puzzles, and just want to absorb its off-beat, deadpan humor and its amazingly rendered and thoughtfully considered setting, you might look upon this game (like I currently am) as one that perhaps did not deserve to sink without a trace the way it seemingly did.

And, hey, if you want a break from scrubbing and strolling you can always sit down with a Turkish telenovela. I can't make out what they're saying but they seem pretty impassioned about it.

Rating: 4 out of 5. (So far.)

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