Fourteen years in the making, this character-driven sci-fi tale is a wonder of technology and imagination so texturally convincing you’ll want to touch it
icktock, ticktock. In the dripping confines of the Fedora 1, an aquatic space colony of exquisite retro-futuristic design, it’s not water but time that exerts an unmistakable pressure on inhabitants. A cataclysmic meteor looms on the horizon, threatening to wipe them all out. But this cast of lovably eccentric characters, including the titular Harold, hurry for no one, preferring to amble about their days while staring down the barrel of cosmic disaster.
It’s fitting that an adventure game as laid back in pacing as Harold Halibut should have been made by a team with a similarly leisurely approach to time. Fourteen years have passed since game director Onat Hekimoglu had the initial idea, while studying for an MA at Cologne Game Lab. Back then, it was a strange point-and-click adventure with earthy stop-motion visuals.
Now Harold Halibut is a spectacular synthesis of analogue and virtual that is so tactile – so texturally convincing – that, at various points playing the game, you may want to reach into the screen and physically touch it.Hekimoglu, who studied film before video games, notes this uncanny quality – that Harold Halibut is a game with “stylised” visuals that, paradoxically, looks “photorealistic”. Nailing down the aesthetic took two years of intensive experimentation.
Tillmann reflects that Harold Halibut’s unconventional development happened in reverse to most games. “People usually start with the technical limitations and then adapt their creative decision-making to that,” he says. “We came up with the world-building, how things look, the concept art – mood, lighting, and atmosphere – very early on. And then it took all that time for the to get closer to that.
But these events galvanised the group, says Tillmann. It was during such months that the team vowed to one another, with a similar resolve to that of their unlikely hero, Harold: “Whatever happens, we’ll push through to the end.”
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