Harold Halibut has the vibes of a game that should be 4-6 hours long and is, inexplicably, 10-12. It's inexplicable not only because it's a slow game low on interaction - the game is really just a plot delivery mechanism; a TV show you can walk around where you advance the story by pressing A - but also because it's a game created using handmade miniatures. It's a sci-fi animated dolls house under the sea, self described as "a cross between a game and a stop motion film", and if my game required that amount of labour I'd edit that script down. Then again, there aren't that many locations, so maybe you'd really want to show them off.

I love miniatures, and Harold Halibut is beautiful. It's also a lovely story about finding yourself and your place in the world, even if that place is unexpected, and having the courage to take that step. There are unexpected silly bits and strange bits and bits where people break into song, and bits where you read undelivered letters. But, at the same time, I totally understand why some people would find it boring.

Read more

Xbox has announced the next wave of games coming to Game Pass in late April.

It begins today with the release of Harold Halibut across cloud, PC and Xbox Series X/S. "A visually arresting, warm-hearted tale of a gofer searching for his purpose, Harold Halibut flounders amongst endless fetch-quests and waffle," reads our Eurogamer Harold Halibut review.

Then later in the month the subscription service will receive the likes of Manor Lords on PC (26th April), and the day one releases Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes (23rd April) and Another Crab's Treasure (25th April).

Read more

Yep, you're herring me right. Hot on the heels of yesterday's o-fish-al Eurogamer review, I dove into the first 90 minnows of Harold Halibut on the Xbox Series X for you in today's (recorded live) Let's Play!

If, like me, you've been reeled in by the game's stunning, handcrafted visuals but want to know whether the gameplay is any good before you pike it up, you have come to the right plaice.

I streamed the Xbox Series X version of Harold Halibut earlier and you can check out my adventures on the video player above. So, pick a perch and tuna in for this look at the beginning portion of this "handmade narrative game about friendship and life on a city-sized spaceship submerged in an alien ocean."

Read more

What if a game was intentionally quite boring? This feels like the premise with Harold Halibut, and at first it's kind of brilliant. You take on the role of the eponymous janitor here, a kind of lab-assistant-slash-gofer and general multipurpose dogsbody aboard the Fedora. A crashed colony spaceship that set off from Earth some time in the late 70s or early 80s, the Fedora has now been stuck, for about 60 years, deep beneath the ocean on a predominantly liquid planet, becoming a kind of self-contained commune that only partially longs for home.

It's a wonderful setup, enabling debut developer Slow Bros to do some of its best work. The Fedora is an extraordinarily realised piece of human craft, with the game built of hand-made, intricately worn and weathered models and sets that have been digitised for animation. Combined with the choice of era you get this kind of Aardman-style visual effect and a deeply retro-Brit kind of humour, centred on bureaucratic Post Office procedures and varying forms of jobsworth. The ship itself, for instance - green-hued, sub-aquatic and slightly industrial, like a miniature village built inside a spirit level - has been subsumed by the unremarkable small-town corporation All Water, with little CRT tellies around the place intermittently buzzed with corporate infomercials and announcements.

During these - and similar opportunities for squiggly-lined, wobbly-audioed video feeds or moments of rickety old-school lab computing - Harold Halibut is probably at its best. Animations, decorations and nice little buttons, even in deeply rudimentary puzzles, are completely enchanting. The humour, when it lands, zeros in on a niche but ever-present part of the collective British psyche, the selfishly entrepreneurial mindset of a very specific kind of small-minded, curtain-twitching, 80s-era middle class. Unfortunately, those moments are quite rare, and the better parts of the rest of the game are weakened by how relentlessly, brutally, interminably slow things are to move forward.

Read more

I never love defining one game with another, and not least a game like Harold Halibut, which wears its influences openly - stop-motion, Wallace and Gromit-style Aardman animations, mixed with maybe a bit of Wes Anderson and in all seriousness, Postman Pat - but which also so clearly deserves to be seen as its own thing.

In this case though it's hard to ignore: the setup for Harold Halibut is very similar to First Contact, arguably the most interesting mission in Starfield (and one itself heavily influenced by a Star Trek: The Next Generation episode called The Neutral Zone), where - spoilers! - you discover a seemingly alien ship lurking in a planet's orbit, emitting weird garbled noises over the radio. You soon discover this is actually a ship from Earth - only one that's taken several hundred years to actually get here, leaving it populated by a load of slightly entitled generational descendents of the original explorers, who's only world is the ship's interior, and only understanding of humanity that which they can read about in the selected history books and classes they have on board.

As for Harold Halibut, Harold is a lab assistant-cum-janitor on a similarly stranded spaceship that has instead become an underwater enclave, after arriving at a presumed Goldilocks planet that actually turned out to have no inhabitable land. Having set off in the late '70s and since been totally submerged beneath this new planet's oceans, though, the ship has become a kind of strange, alternate-universe time capsule, filled with fuzzy CRT monitors, intercoms with wobbly sound, and very specific kinds of little England jobsworths. (Much of Harold Halibut, a narrative adventure game about completing largely mundane tasks as a wider, more existential mystery unfolds, feels like a trip to the local Post Office, where you're informed you can't send that letter because you've placed your stamp slightly too close to the label. And that's the wrong kind of envelope.)

Read more

I never love defining one game with another, and not least a game like Harold Halibut, which wears its influences openly - stop-motion, Wallace and Gromit-style Aardman animations, mixed with maybe a bit of Wes Anderson and in all seriousness, Postman Pat - but which also so clearly deserves to be seen as its own thing.

In this case though it's hard to ignore: the setup for Harold Halibut is very similar to First Contact, arguably the most interesting mission in Starfield (and one itself heavily influenced by a Star Trek: The Next Generation episode called The Neutral Zone), where - spoilers! - you discover a seemingly alien ship lurking in a planet's orbit, emitting weird garbled noises over the radio. You soon discover this is actually a ship from Earth - only one that's taken several hundred years to actually get here, leaving it populated by a load of slightly entitled generational descendents of the original explorers, who's only world is the ship's interior, and only understanding of humanity that which they can read about in the selected history books and classes they have on board.

As for Harold Halibut, Harold is a lab assistant-cum-janitor on a similarly stranded spaceship that has instead become an underwater enclave, after arriving at a presumed Goldilocks planet that actually turned out to have no inhabitable land. Having set off in the late '70s and since been totally submerged beneath this new planet's oceans, though, the ship has become a kind of strange, alternate-universe time capsule, filled with fuzzy CRT monitors, intercoms with wobbly sound, and very specific kinds of little England jobsworths. (Much of Harold Halibut, a narrative adventure game about completing largely mundane tasks as a wider, more existential mystery unfolds, feels like a trip to the local Post Office, where you're informed you can't send that letter because you've placed your stamp slightly too close to the label. And that's the wrong kind of envelope.)

Read more