Every year when you take a look at the game schedule, a few catch your eye in a powerful way. It could be because of its name, because of its belonging to a consolidated saga, because of the originality of its approach or even because of its visual style. Why yes: in the same way that there are animated films that dazzle the eye with the vision of just one of their frames, there are video games that play the card of visual recreation to attract the attention of whoever chooses. Rollerdrome either Saberto give two recent examples, were two games about which a simple glance was enough to make you want to know more.
This year, among all the games that were destined to come out, there was everything: medieval aesthetics, fantastic space adventure, the return of final fantasyFromsoftware’s return to the Middle Lands… but among all those frames there was one from which it was impossible to separate your eyes: Harold Halibut. Suffice to say it was handmade. For many, that is like finding a truffle in the middle of the field.
When you get your hands on it you realize that it is a huge job. stop motion (similar to the one used in Wallace & Gromit or in Fantastic Mr. Fox) in which the game’s development team, Slow Bros, has been immersed for more than 10 years. The game tells the story of Harold and the city of Fedora, built under the sea on the remains of a crashed spaceship. One sees the trailer and couldn’t be more eager to immerse oneself, never better said, in that experience so apparently groundbreaking, so apparently so well made.
But no matter how much the game enters through the eyes, the potential of Harold Halibut is wasted on a purely aesthetic experience. That is to say: you may have some great ideas to propose a graphic adventure, and this game has them. You can have a story to tell, well-defined characters, an interesting world and a striking visual identity. Again, this game has them. But for everything to work in an organic and interactive way, you must provide it with a mechanical framework that makes the player communicate not with the identity of the game, but with the act of playing it. And here, unfortunately, that does not appear: there is no inventory, the puzzles are laughable, the actions that the protagonist can carry out are accessory, the feeling of interaction is minimal. At the end of the journey, and no matter how dazzling it is at first, the game ends up being an experience in which, at times – and what comes next is the great tragedy of Harold Halibut—, the player ends up thinking that this story, characters and setting would have been better captured in the form of a movie and not a game.
It is a sinking ship, but not the end of the fleet. With its uncompromising commitment to visual personality, Harold Halibut shows the extent to which video games can be used to develop a radical creative experience. It is true that it fails as a game, but it points the way as an ambitious creative proposal that, we hope, many others will try to emulate. To paraphrase Beckett, specific disappointments like this are what magnify the environment in the long term. Because you will fail more times, yes, but with this spirit, the next time you will fail better.
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