Harold Halibut
HAROLD HALIBUT plays things too safe for its own good
Harold Halibut’s most enduring running gag is about a Turkish soap opera called Sonsuz Ask. Ardent fans will try to sell you on it – just wait for it to really pick up in season 22 – but the hard truth is that you’ll have to endure a lot of long, barren stretches before you get to the good stuff. Even in space, you probably have better things to do with your time.
Harold Halibut has a lot in common with Sonsuz Ask.
You are Harold, the unsophisticated, sincere and (literally) wide-eyed handyman aboard the good ship Fedora I, which has been stuck at the bottom of an alien ocean for 50years after a solar flare knocked it out of the void. Harold is a dreamer and an optimist, an open and honest soul who people naturally confide in.
Which they do regularly. Most of your playtime is spent walking between conversations, and most of those conversations consist of people unloading their burdens onto Harold’s shoulders. The shopkeeper needs someone to talk to about his marriage, the ship’s captain feels unprepared for his role, and someone simply must repair the relationship between a quartet of receptionists who I can only describe as possessing a ‘bus conductor genotype’.
WHERE’S HOME?
On and on it goes as you guide Harold between chats in which people choose to make their neuroses the plumber’s problem. It’s not without charm: Slow Bros clearly has affection for its characters. Combine that with the game’s impressive handmade claymation-esque art style that dovetails nicely with its school-play-like delivery – and you have a recipe to pique my curiosity. But those chats often have the feeling of an after-school TV special: sweet, simple themes and morals, delivered clearly. It gets fatiguing, and all the stranger because you catch occasional flashes of a more daring game hidden underneath.
The game shies away from making any of its characters too villainous
Every so often, I’d find myself gradually shutting down as this or that conversation dragged on, only to be jolted into alertness by a phrase like “anarcho-syndicalist hacktivist collective” a discourse about the aesthetics of Christ, or a Turkish rendition of Bella Ciao suddenly kicking in as Harold gets political. But that bolder game is only glimpsed.
Some of those chats are optional. A determined player could mainline the game’s central plot and ignore its sentimental side-roads, but the issue is that Harold Halibut’s story seems almost determined not to start. The pacing is off, and would be that way even if you didn’t take an hour to go do the optional task where you read a bunch of people’s private letters with the postman.
