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The weird and wonderful world of Harold Halibut is entirely hand-built. It's not the strangest thing about Slow Bros' upcoming narrative adventure about an unlikely friendship between a human and an alien fishman as they search for the meaning of home. Still, it's by far the most unexpected element right off the bat. "We started out working with actual stop-motion animation," art director Ole Tillmann tells us of the game's stylistic origins, "[But] we made an early decision to continue building the game’s world and characters like we would for a stop-motion film, but using digital animation instead."
The result is a nostalgia-tinged, claymation-style delight, complete with all the charming oddity of a Wes Anderson classic. It's a unique choice for a video game, stunning as it is. Slow Bros. consider this handmade component a way of "unearthing fantastical thoughts and making them accessible to game-playing people," according to Tillmann – and Harold Halibut is nothing if not fantastical.
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The first thing you should know about Harold Halibut is that the game takes place on FEDORA. Not the kind you wear on your head, but a city-sized deep sea vessel bobbing about beneath an alien ocean.
The gameplay itself sounds rather simple: as a third-person adventure, we'll be moving Harold the fishman about with his human companion, with your key interaction points being your conversations with fellow FEDORA-dwellers. "I think it takes a moment of patience to get into, because it is very narrative-focused and cutscene heavy," says Tillman. "But once you adjust, it really opens up this otherworldly sensation of being in this strange new world."
The strangeness that infuses life aboard FEDORA puts you in two places at once. It feels like a window to the past, thanks to its digital stop-motion animation, but the touches of vibrant psychedelia look like something out of a 70s sci-fi magazine. In many ways it's therefore a futuristic setting as imagined in the past, and that temporal complication is part of what Tillman calls "psychedelic surrealism".
"My longest lasting interest in art is surrealism, and at the time of making the world of the game, we were digging through all the abandoned fantasy culture from the 60s and 70s," he says of Harold Halibut's artistic touchstones. Another surprising influence on the game? Anime, including "all the big names that washed over here during the 90s, feature films, as well as shows and their manga origins."
The cross-media influences don't stop there. Tillman goes on to cite Hong Kong film director Wong Kar-wai's "moods" as points of inspiration, and even Spielberg's cinematic grandiosity.
Harold Halibut is nothing short of fantastical.
Harold Halibut is articulated through a collection of different mediums because its creators are a very varied bunch. The game will be Slow Bros' first feature-length game, with the studio comprising developers with backgrounds from carpentry to filmmaking. With such a unique composition of creators, Harold Halibut's unconventional art style feels almost inevitable.
"The very first reason for doing it the way we did it was that the first 3 people working on the game had no other way [of working]," Tillman says of the early stages. "Building things was their strongest way of telling a story. I was working as an illustrator at the time and always connected to this way of thinking, some sort of hand connection first, digital processing later. We then found a really vivid connection as a group over the world building. Again, that was informed by sitting there with actual little rooms in front of us, and wondering what story to tell within them."
Magical, mythical, and meticulously handcrafted with love, Harold Halibut is an enigma. Slow Bros. has yet to announce a firm release date, aside from the fact that it's coming out in the next 12 months, but we already have a hunch that this immersive narrative adventure could be Big in 2024.
