Harold Halibut: when getting bored becomes an art form

There’s something about being bored, even if we’re not all equal when it comes to boredom. We’ve all experienced moments of weariness so profound, so dense, that they seem to alter relativity, even slowing down the passage of time. Being bored is as much a nuisance as complicating life or going out of your way to achieve something. Being bored, especially with a video game, is often a sign of failed, frustrating experiences or anecdotal stories. I didn’t think I’d be using this term in a positive way when talking about a game. In this analisys I consider Harold Halibut as a total work of art. Yes, it’s a pain in the arse, it even manages the feat of being a pain in the arse according to the two definitions of a pain in the arse set out above, and yet it does it with art and style.

This article spoils elements of the game’s story, so I advise you to have played it before reading it.

A bit of background before I begin, as this article is not intended to deal with the game itself but with my feelings about it. Harold Halibut is a purely narrative game released on 16 April 2024, developed and published by the German studio Slow Bros based in Cologne. We play as Harold Halibut, a sort of handyman on the ship Feodora I. Fearing a fatal fate for humanity during the Cold War, a group of explorers is sent into space aboard the Feodora to save the species, more than 200 years ago. Unfortunately, they land on an ocean planet, turning the ship into a veritable underwater microcosm. After the water landing, a whole society was set up and is working hard in the hope of being able to resume the voyage. In the course of our adventure, we come face-to-face with an extraterrestrial intelligence for the very first time.

Harold Halibut is unique in that it is a hand-made game. Its director, Onat Hekimoglu, trained as a scriptwriter and is good at making things with his hands, but has no particular training in coding or development. It was to showcase these skills that the decision was made to physically produce all the elements of the game and to offer a stop motion experience. He will be calling on Olle Tillman as artistic director. Tillman is a graduate of the Rhodes Island School of Design, where the emphasis is on hand-crafting and not on digital technology.

A long gestation period :

Let’s start with its creators, the Slow Bros. studio, SLOW BROS. Right from the start, we understand that they don’t want to give us an image of dynamism and speed. You’d think that before Germany, they were in my native south, a region where you take your time, slowly in the morning and not too quickly in the afternoon. And they took their time. Over a decade in development, the project started in 2010! Don’t think they’ve been twiddling their thumbs, no, quite the contrary. Let’s just say that they’re hard workers, in the noble sense of the word. Slow Bros are what you might call true craftsmen; lovers of a job well done, who produce things with their hands, and what things might those be? Well, they’ve created their entire game in clay puppets.

The creation process is tedious: each character is first drawn with precision, then 1/10th scale drawings are made to create models of the characters. A wire skeleton is then created, to serve as a support for the clay and as a mobile structure for creating the various character animations. Next comes the clay modelling, with the bodies first assembled and then painted. Then all the clothes have to be made to dress the statue. They are sewn from small pieces of textile, sometimes artificially aged to give them that lived-in feel. It’s a long process, and one that will be carried out for the twenty or so characters we meet on our adventure.

As if that wasn’t enough work for the team, the sets will also be made by hand. Quite simply, everything you see on screen was first created in the form of a model. This work with materials allows us to breathe a little bit of life into Harold Halibut’s world. Each set has a material, tangible reality, bringing out the best in terms of the texture of the materials, the colours and also the way in which the light illuminates the different surfaces. Each set is teeming with detail, wit and humour. They are a pleasure to observe, at length, meticulously, as if to miss nothing of their richness, a sort of ‘Where’s Charlie’ without Charlie, but with the same desire to find everything the developers might have hidden there. Some of the walls in the game, for example, are real little walls made of tiny mortar bricks, and the walls have sometimes been left outside for weeks on end so that the material can live and absorb the vagaries of the weather. The metal is also left in the rain to rust. To house a living space, the materials have to live themselves. Every little element is designed to give credibility to the settings and reinforce the immersion felt by the player.

Having created everything, you now have to animate it. The logical choice, when you like to spend a lot of time on it, is to use stop motion. So the Slow Bros team naturally turned to stop-motion. From an artistic point of view, stop-motion is a technique that is perfectly consistent with the creative intention behind the project. To create an impression of fluid, coherent movement, every step, every gesture, has to be broken down to the last detail. Some of the best animation studios manage to produce as little as 4 seconds of film a day, a real painstaking task. You can imagine how long it takes to make a 2-hour film, and then a 15-hour game. When I said that Slow Bros liked to get bored, that’s what it’s all about, they don’t hesitate to give all their time and energy to the project. Stop-motion can be seen as an art form that celebrates patience and perseverance. It’s an art in which every micro-element of the composition is mastered to express as precisely as possible what you want. Stop-motion is also about breathing life into the inanimate, sometimes taking weeks of work to produce just a few minutes of that life. Stop-motion seems to be the perfect bridge between visual storytelling and craft.

That’s all well and good, but where’s the stop-motion in Harold Halibut? My answer is that there isn’t any, or not any more in fact. In fact, the project was initially designed to be made in stop motion, with all the character in terms of rendering and the materiality that the technique suggests. Following the initial trials, the team was far from convinced, as a number of problems arose. First of all, it was very difficult to ensure that the characters were lit in a way that was consistent with the position of the lights in the scene, no matter where they were. The problem stems from the way the images are captured: during the shooting, the characters are animated against a green background and then digitally integrated into the sets, hence the difficulty encountered with dynamic lighting. Another problem with this technique is that the characters never really seem to be in the scene, but float slightly, like a badly made collage. No matter how much they reworked the overlay, nothing helped, the discrepancy persisted. Slow Bros then called on the talents of Olle Tillman as art director to help them solve the problem.

After some thought, the tough decision was taken to use photogrammetry and dispense with the stop-motion technique initially envisaged. The aim? To retain the visual rendering of the clay puppet and the hand-made sets, while using 3D models that were much easier to animate. In view of this new production efficiency, the team changed its ideas and wanted to transform the game from a point’n click to a real-time walking simulator, but, as you can imagine, not everything is so simple with Slow Bros. Although photogrammetry makes the animation work less time-consuming, it is in return for the quantity of photos that have to be taken to obtain the 3D models. In the making of the game, they state that each set element, each small object and each character required between 2 and 500 photographs. The 3D models also required a great deal of work to clean up the small artefacts resulting from the scans in order to obtain the closest possible rendering of the real puppet. For the animation, the studio even had the luxury of using motion capture. It’s a time-consuming process, but one that allows all the little imperfections and materials of the handmade puppets and sets to be captured as faithfully as possible.

Ultimately, the Slow Bros teams have never lived up to their name so well. They have dedicated themselves over many years to fine-tuning every detail, true perfectionists with a real creative intent. We sometimes refer to them as video game craftsmen, and Slow Bros are well deserving of that title.

For all the boredom in the universe:

Harold Halibut is a game that takes a realistic approach, although the universe is in no way banal, it’s a simulation of life with all the more boring or redundant aspects that suggests. You’d think that life on a ship on another planet would be exciting, but it’s not. From the very first scene, the game presents us with an administrative imbroglio, an opening that directly sets the tone. Harold has got the wrong colour ticket and is at the station to explain himself. It’s a daring way of introducing us to the minor ups and downs of modern society in a world we know nothing about yet, except that there are several different colours of transport ticket.
And what kind of transport is – ‘For All Water’ -? Feodora I is an underwater company, so we had to find a suitable means of transport – ‘For All Water’-. To link up Feodora’s various modules, a system of pneumatic tubes called the All Water Tube System was created. It’s a system that we’re going to use all too often – ‘For All Water’- and all too often it’s going to slow us down. Every time we use it, we’ll hear the slogan ‘For All Water’ echoing through the station, and I’ve tried to give you a textual overview of it; believe me, you won’t be able to stand hearing it any longer. Clearly they’re a pain in the arse, as evidenced by the way they work, which bears an uncanny resemblance to a toilet flush.

The game even pisses us off in the details of its universe. Although interesting for its zany, funny and absurd aspects, it decides, for example, to represent science in its purely theoretical aspect, i.e. the least demonstrative. Far from the explosions, experiments and technological feats; no, here it’s all about geology, botany and clever calculations to ensure that everything goes according to plan. We’ve seen other accounts of science that were far more interactive and attractive. 

In a way, the game represents all the little inconveniences of life, all the little frustrations of everyday life, and it does this wonderfully. It does everything it can to frustrate us, to make us feel the heaviness of everyday life, from transport to repetitive tasks. It even manages to frustrate us when it comes to getting things done. I’ll share with you the example of the graffiti that Harold has to clean up: as well as not putting any effort into it, which is perfectly understandable, the game never lets us completely clean it up, taking control away from us before the last spot of paint has disappeared; enough to give the most perfectionist among us a rash.
The game plays with boredom just as it plays with us, and it also plays with the notion of time.

The relationship with time :

The passage of time and our relationship with it depend very much on how we spend it. In Harold Halibut, you’ll find that time is long. A very long time. As long as it takes to get around Feodora 1 at rush hour. Travel is slow; life is monotonous. Quickly into the story you learn that the next take-off window is approaching, and with it comes a countdown. This countdown gives you a goal but also a sense of urgency, as well as a time marker indicating the end of our boredom: in 89 days, we’ll have to be ready.
The station is now busy preparing for take-off. All the scientific staff are checking and rechecking their calculations, and there is still some data missing from the equation, but this is enough to boost our interest and Harold’s motivation. Time passes, not always very quickly with the controller in hand, but the countdown continues relentlessly. Then, as the big day approached, the revelation. The Feodora 1 administration has been lying to its inhabitants. For several years now, it has been reducing the length of the day, little by little, minute by minute, in order to save available energy. As well as directly undermining the plans by distorting the calculations made to predict the departure, this countdown to freedom and the long-awaited denouement of our adventure were nothing more than a pipe dream, a vain hope of finally seeing our boredom come to an end. When you’re just a few days away from the end and you’re just waiting for the denouement to put an end to the boredom, seeing more than 400 days go by was an emotional lift from which I almost didn’t recover.

Harold Halibut :

It’s time to talk about our hero Harold Halibut. Harold isn’t really a hero in the way you might imagine, he’s more of a window through which you immerse yourself in the story. At first glance, he’s not particularly endearing. He’s a young man, an assistant in a laboratory and a maintenance worker on Feodora 1. He comes across as absent-minded, naive, soft and a little unattractive with his big, fried whiting eyes, his livid complexion and his nonchalant gait. Harold is a gentle dreamer who wants something else for his life, but doesn’t know what. Despite himself, he indulges in this everyday life that doesn’t suit him; his thoughts are a refuge as much as a permanent distraction. Surrounded by scientists, he doesn’t seem to be very intelligent or cultured, or capable of playing an important role in the potential events to come, just an average person in an average life. As the hours pass, Harold’s character is revealed, making him more and more endearing to us. He may not be the most charismatic or the bravest, but Harold is profoundly kind and benevolent; at times childlike, just look at the nature of his relationship with Jeanne Mareaux, his mentor, who comes to collect him from the station at the very start of the game, as if she were his own mother. He has the soul of an artist, as evidenced by the scene in which he cleans the filters, Harold complaining about his condition while singing and ending with a veritable a cappella opera song in which he sings all the distress of his daily life; there are also all the drawings he makes in his precious notebook that retrace the whole of his daily life. A daily routine which, of course, bores him terribly.

This was without counting on the work of fate, which will seize Harold when he least expects it. During yet another filter cleaning, Harold has an encounter that changes everything. The first thing he sees through the glass of the tank is a humanoid shadow suspended in the water. He quickly emptied the tank and found himself face to face with an unconscious alien creature, resembling a hybrid of man and fish. Harold tells Mareaux about his discovery and they decide to hide the creature and take care of it. After several clumsy and unsuccessful attempts by Harold, the creature finally wakes up. Astonishment! It talks, it even has a name, Weeoo, we are witnessing humanity’s first encounter with an intelligent extraterrestrial entity. Mareaux hastily creates a translation device to understand the creature and be able to communicate with it. Here, too, we are far from the clichés of alien stories, which are often portrayed as a threat. The encounter is a gentle one, with each species trying to discover the other in a benevolent manner. It’s also a radical change for Harold, who seems to form a strong bond with Weeoo as they get to know each other. Meeting Weeoo will upset the plans of the inhabitants of Feodora 1, but it will also mark the start of a new life for our dear Halibut.

Emotional interactivity :

Harold Halibut is a deeply boring game to play, as boring as poor Harold’s life can be. It doesn’t shine in terms of gameplay, which ultimately boils down to wandering from one task to the next. Even the ‘mini-games’ are just another mission to complete, without offering any real gameplay challenge of their own. In short, nothing really exciting. Interactivity will bring emotions, and the game did a brilliant job of putting me in the same emotional state as Harold. Just as Harold is bored in his daily life, I’m bored at his controls. Like Harold, I seek pleasure in life’s little jolts. Like Harold, I become a naive dreamer waiting for something else to break the monotony of the game’s experience. Without even knowing what I might be hoping for, I aspire to something else. Like Harold, I’m going to feel a bit alone in this experience, with this deep feeling that it’s not for me. Like Harold I’m going to be amazed by brief moments of magic, sometimes full of banality, simple, but which break the routine; as if I won’t be able to appreciate them without the boredom that precedes them.

Out of the monotony of the experience come a few moments of pure poetry, accompanied by a beautiful melody played on the piano, a few seconds of pleasure suspended in time in the midst of a very dull life. I think back to the excitement of reading a new letter with his friend Buddy. The impatience and curiosity to finally discover the habitat of Weeoo and his fellow creatures.
I’m not playing Harold, I’m becoming Harold, his emotional state is mine, his weariness is mine, his expectations are my expectations and his adventures are now part of my experience too. This immersion is made possible first and foremost by the great credibility of the settings, the fine, very British writing of the characters and the improbability of this little underwater world. The universe always manages to intrigue and surprise us, with a feeling of perpetual discovery. We get to know the characters and Feodora, who reveals her secrets in dribs and drabs. In the end, it’s also the story itself that plays the perfect little alchemist between my interest and my boredom.

Conclusion:

Harold Halibut is a singular game, which I had to digest for a long time before I could say a word about it. Objectively speaking, I shouldn’t have liked the game, finding it too limited, too soft, too boring; in short, not up to scratch in terms of fun. Nor should I have become attached to this universe, which does everything it can to bring out the little, very real worries of everyday life. But that’s not what I remember about it; I’m left more impressed by individual moments than by the whole, as if the general impression of boredom was swept away by the strength of those moments. A kind of necessity of boredom in order to fully savour each break. Harold remains in my mind as a difficult or unpleasant experience for which I would have remembered above all the few flashes of happiness. A bit like an 8-hour hike in the rain and cold for 5 minutes of breathtaking scenery at the summit. It played with my interest and got me past its heaviness and the lack of pleasure felt when I held the controller in my hand. With Harold Halibut, I have to admit that being bored has never been so enjoyable.

Sources :

Rollo Roming – A Video Game Made Out of Brick, Clay and Tenacity -New York Times – 2024
Harold Halibut Is Made Out of Brick, Clay and Tenacity – The New York Times (nytimes.com)

Jon “Sikamikanico” Clarke – The Making of Harold Halibut – Xbox Era – durée : 12, 21 min – 2024
The Making of Harold Halibut | Preview – YouTube

Danielle Partis – Harold Halibut : Un récit sincère, fait à la main, sur les poissons, l’amitié et la recherche d’un foyer – Xbox Wire – 2024
Harold Halibut : Un récit sincère, fait à la main, sur les poissons, l’amitié et la recherche d’un foyer – Xbox Wire en Francais

Mara Frampton – Harold Halibut Interview with Slow Bros: On Tactile Gaming – Skywigly Animation Magazine – 2021
Harold Halibut Interview with Slow Bros: On Tactile Gaming – Skwigly Animation Magazine