——For my favorite game in 2024!!!
Harold Halibut's story is as unique and heartwarming as its visual style - a sci-fi tale. It all begins aboard a spaceship, the Fedora I, a massive spacecraft used to find a new home after mankind's escape from Earth. However, due to a technical malfunction, the Fedora I is stranded at the bottom of an ocean-covered planet, and the humans on board are forced to accept the reality that they can't continue their voyage and embark on a whole new way of surviving in this unfamiliar environment.
Retrofuturism and Sunken Utopia - Harold Halibut's fictional setting can be categorized as retrofuturism, which is how game studio Slow Bros. defines the game. It is an examination and re- creation of a future fantasy of the past, which is reflected in the game through visuals and narrative. Retrofuturism is characterized by a revival of old-time future imaginings, such as envisioning the distant future from the perspective of the 1950s or 1960s, with common elements such as futuristic but still era-limited technological devices, sleek and muted industrial designs, and visions of a better social utopia.
On the visual side, in Harold Halibut we can see a distinctly fantastical style in the interiors of the spaceships - the mechanics are simple and straightforward, the color palette is muted and full of hand-crafted traces, while at the same time combining a futuristic, high-tech vibe. Unlike the white and grey-based space and machine design found in common modern sci-fi/future sci-fi works, Fedora I's environment is so colorful: the captain's cockpit is wrapped in red lights and dense instrument panels, and above it there is a garden-like glass vault that lets through green seawater to create a soft, complementary color palette; Professor Mao's lab has blue walls and an entire glass wall behind lush green aquatic plants, dotted in places with orange and yellow lights; when the player manipulates Harold to pull down a certain hidden lever, a wall of colorful specimens slowly descends from the ceiling accompanied by the sound of electricity. As we can see, these machines and these facilities are not striving for ultimate simplicity and efficiency; instead, they operate in a more complex way than we might expect. It might remind us of Wes Anderson's Asteroid City - sweet, cute 1950s colors, wacky machines invented by kids, wary aliens falling from the sky, and an automated drink machine that serves martinis — a coin-operated machine, so advanced but retro, slowly extends a metal arm that slices off the peel of a lemon in a circle.
The ship itself is also a “sunken utopia”, a symbol of humanity's hopeful but trapped world; Fedora I was a symbol of the spark of human civilization, but after centuries of stagnation at the bottom of the ocean, that hope has faded in the face of the monopoly of resources by the capitalist corporations, the fixed community and a life full of compromises (but, in Harold Halibut's story, it is beginning to be rekindled among children and researchers). This paradoxical narrative emotion, warm on the surface and cold on the bottom, is well represented by one of the characters in the game: the captain of Fedora I, who seems responsible and always busy working; however, when Harold cares for him, he truly shows his confusion and sadness. “What's a captain without a ship?” The Captain puts it this way - as someone born and raised on the sunken Fedora I, he feels a deep emptiness and nihilism about the responsibilities he has shouldered, and if the ship never starts up again, what is the value of his life? In a broader sense, if the ship sinks in an alien deep sea far from Earth, no longer able to shoulder the responsibility of continuing human civilization, then these people on Fedora I, what have they dedicated their lives to, and where should they go?
The fictional part of the game, however, is not only reflected in its story and aesthetic style, but is deeply rooted in its world-building. In the game's third chapter, Harold follows the Fishy to her homeworld. They leave Fedora I and take a submarine deep into the green waters, all the way down-until they come to a cavern at the bottom of the ocean (where Harold exclaims, “For the first time in my life, I'm stepping on real ground”). These gentle extraterrestrials have a very different social structure than the humans on Fedora I: Fedora's inhabitants are virtually controlled by a company called All Water, which has a monopoly on providing piped transportation to all parts of the ship as well as a daily water supply for an ever-increasing price; in order to conserve energy and turn out the lights earlier, the CEO of All Water has taken away all the clocks and watches and “cuts” the residents' activities by a few minutes each year.
In the alien's natural cave, however, nothing needs to be “bought” with “money” - Harold tries to pick up a bit of food from the stall, and the shopkeeper just nods, with a soft cooing voice. These extraterrestrial inhabitants, like some indigenous people from some parts in the earth, follow the model of a gift economy rather than a market economy, giving and exchanging instead of money and purchasing - not only between themselves, but also between themselves and nature (in their context, the ecological cycle of nature can also be interpreted as part of the gift economy). economy). This makes Harold Halibut's game world seem so rich and fascinating.
Harold Halibut is not a game that emphasizes innovative gameplay: it is entirely in the service of a narrative experience that resembles classic stop-motion animation, and thus intersperses easy- to-finish simple puzzles with lots of elaborate animation and movement through various scenes and adventures. These puzzles and mini-levels are based on the storyline, which nicely enriches the story and interactivity of the game world. For example, on the alien homeworld there is a public library, but instead of books, there are hot springs of various sizes on the walls and floors that the alien inhabitants rely on to gain knowledge by simply lying in. As a “clue-seeking” level, players maneuver Harold close to the walls and listen to the messages emanating from each hole in the wall. Visually, a montage of real-life images appears on the screen out of the darkness, showing the flow of information in fragments. The level is simple (just constant movement and tapping) but so captivating in its visual and auditory effects. Other smaller gameplay experiences/interactions include the player controlling Harold as he slowly wipes “Where's Home” graffiti off the wall with a mop, cleaning a water reservoir (while suddenly starting to sing at the top of his lungs), controlling a conveyor belt to grind mineral samples into powder, and so on. These elements both add dimension to the character and reveal that Harold's job is tedious on some level - it corresponds to a moment in the story when Harold is on the verge of a mental breakdown due to the drudgery and meaninglessness of his work - without really boring the player.
However, it's also the pursuit of the game's narrative and beautiful visuals that detracts from Harold Halibut's gameplay as a game. With the narrative experience reigning supreme, it's really hard to birth gameplay that doesn't ruin the immersion of the story. The fictional world of Fedora I is full of detail, but this depth slows down the pace of the game at some points instead. Players may spend a lot of time exploring the ship's environment and having to repeatedly run between repetitive locations for quests (there's no fast teleportation system) that don't always lead to satisfying rewards; this pacing drag can erode the player's patience. Additionally, there are portions of the minigame that occasionally seem disconnected from the setting: certain quests lack sufficient narrative drive, such as sudden puzzle solving. In other words, these interactions are not directly connected to story development and exist only to fill out the game's content.
However, as I mentioned in the Business Models essay, Harold Halibut's team, Slow Bros. does have a clear idea of the audience they're aiming for (arguably, gamers who demand literary and artistic expression from their games while still not being very good at playing them), the preferences of the members of their gaming team, and their skill strengths and weaknesses. As Slow Bros. puts it on their official website - “Our diverse backgrounds include video game production, film making, carpentry, apparel, and illustration give our collective a unique skill set with various applications.” What they're trying to do isn't so much designing how starkly innovative the gameplay is, either, but rather “dedicated to thoughtfully bridging analogue and digital worlds in the form of interactive experiences.”
The warm feeling of the game's art style and the fairytale-like, lovely personalities of the story's characters contrast with the story's melancholic backdrop of people wandering far from their home on Earth, leaving the mood to vacillate between warmth and melancholy. Everything seems to converge into the line of red graffiti Harold sees repeatedly at the entrance of the lab - “Where's Home?”
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