Harold Halibut

Ten years, one puppet at a time

Harold Halibut's story is, in some ways, secondary to the story of how it was made. Slow Bros. spent roughly a decade building every character, room, prop and set piece in the game as a real, physical model — sculpted, painted and lit by hand using traditional model-making and stop-motion techniques, then scanned into the game engine and animated. It's an approach no other commercial game has attempted at this scale, and the result is genuinely striking: characters that move with a distinctive, tactile puppet-like quality even during smooth, lip-synced dialogue, sets that carry the specific texture of handmade craft rather than digital modelling. Whatever else this review has to say about the game underneath that presentation, the visual achievement itself is close to undisputed — even the harshest critical reviews consistently credit it as something genuinely special.

A critical reception more divided than most

What sets Harold Halibut apart from most games in this library isn't the presence of criticism — it's how genuinely split professional critics were on the final product. Metacritic's platform scores range from 68 on PC to 78 on Xbox, and individual critic reviews span from perfect 10-out-of-10 scores to marks as low as 5, a spread wide enough that one commentator publicly expressed being "shook" by the low aggregate given how beautiful and well-crafted the world clearly is. Steam's own player base is more forgiving in aggregate — Very Positive at 82.4% — but that's still a notably softer score than most acclaimed 2024 narrative games manage, and reading the negative reviews reveals the same specific complaint critics were making, just from a much larger sample of voices.

The complaint underneath the craft

That complaint, stated plainly and repeatedly: there's very little actual game here. Multiple detailed reviews independently describe the experience in almost identical terms — no inventory system, no puzzle-solving of any kind, objectives that amount to walking from one location to another to trigger the next conversation or a simple fetch task. One reviewer's blunt summary captures the sentiment as directly as it can be stated: the game is essentially a train on a track that goes to the next station, with no meaningful choices along the way. Another offers a specific, memorable metaphor — like being handed a beautifully wrapped gift, only to discover the wrapping paper itself is the entire gift, with nothing more substantial inside once you finish unwrapping it.

Several reviewers who otherwise enjoyed the presentation describe a specific breaking point where the tedium overtook their patience, most commonly cited around the third chapter or the five-hour mark, as the same walking-and-fetching loop repeats without meaningfully evolving. At a runtime several reviewers put at ten to fifteen hours, that repetition compounds into real frustration for a genuine share of the audience, distinct from simply preferring a faster pace — these are reviewers explicitly saying the specific loop of tasks became actively boring well before the story's themes had room to land.

What still works, even for critics of the gameplay

It's worth being fair to what does land, because a meaningful number of the same critical reviews explicitly credit real strengths alongside the gameplay complaint. Voice acting draws consistent praise across nearly the entire spectrum, giving the handcrafted characters genuine warmth. The soundtrack earns similarly consistent credit. And the overarching story — about isolation, found family, and searching for a sense of home aboard a ship that's been drifting for generations — resonates for a real share of players and critics alike, even some who spent much of the review complaining about the walking in between. This isn't a case of a genuinely bad story wrapped in pretty visuals; it's a decent, sometimes affecting story that a real, vocal share of its audience feels doesn't need — or reward — the amount of repetitive traversal asked of the player to reach it.

A cost that's easy to underestimate from the outside

It's worth pausing on why a decade-long, hand-crafted production still ended up this thin on interactivity, since it's a fair question a reader might reasonably ask. Building every character, room and prop as a physical model before scanning it in is an enormously labour-intensive process compared to conventional 3D modelling, and it's reasonable to infer that the sheer scale of that undertaking left comparatively little development capacity for iterating on systems like puzzles, branching dialogue or meaningful player choice — the kinds of features that usually demand their own dedicated design and testing cycles independent of the visual pipeline. That's not an excuse offered by the developers in any statement this review found, and it doesn't change what players are actually getting for their money. But it does help explain, rather than simply criticise, why a studio capable of this level of visual ambition ended up shipping a game so many reviewers describe as mechanically thin — the ambition and the thinness may well be two sides of the same extraordinary, decade-long bet.

Verdict

Harold Halibut is a genuine, one-of-a-kind artistic achievement — ten years of physical craftsmanship translated into a video game in a way nothing else in the medium has attempted at this scale, and that alone makes it worth knowing about regardless of how the review below lands. Where it falls short, according to a critical reception more divided than almost any other game this library has covered and a real, consistent share of its own Steam audience, is gameplay: walking, fetching and talking, repeated across a runtime several reviewers found dragged well before its themes had room to fully land. If a slow, contemplative pace and a genuinely unprecedented visual style are enough to carry you through on their own terms, there's real emotional payoff here. If you need an adventure game to actually challenge you along the way, the near-unanimous complaint about what's missing underneath the presentation is worth taking seriously before buying at full price.