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.

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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.)

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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