Stop-motion-style narrative game Harold Halibut lands April release date

The rather charming-looking Harold Halibut has landed itself a release date.

The stop-motion-style narrative game will arrive across PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S on 16th April. It will also be available on Game Pass.

“Having a release date is incredible and surreal to us! It represents the end of an era: The marathon of bringing this dream of ours to light,” the team at Slow Bros. said following this announcement.

“Now we can't wait to see how it stirs players, what it makes them feel, reminds them of in their lives and maybe inspires them to do. Everyone finally gets to puppeteer Harold through this miniature world that shows our literal fingerprints which we built for them.”

Harold Halibut features a unique and rather special stop-motion look, which has been created by using physical models made with classic sculpting and modelmaking techniques. But it looks aren't all Harold Halibut has going for it. The developer has also promised to “riveting cinematic storyline” for players to experience. According to the developer, it will take players around 12 hours to complete Harold Halibut, although a completionist playthrough can take up to 18 hours.

Our Chris Tapsell recently took Harold Hallibut's demo for a spin, and he was left impressed, imploring others not to sleep on it.

“It's a testament to the power of writing as much as underwater style, in how its characters each feel uniquely deep and funny and very humanly weird, and how well it captures the vivid small-world syndrome of village life, contained but perfectly preserved here like a closed terrarium,” he wrote in our Harold Halibut demo impressions.

“Like Starfield or Star Trek, it's taken an interesting thought experiment and ran with it – but beyond Starfield or Star Trek, it's given that idea time and space to linger, and in doing so allowed a whole ecosystem of life to blossom out.”