Harold Halibut

The game's adventure gameplay is a linear, story-driven experience that takes place across six chapters. Players navigate the interior districts of the Fedora and interact or overhear conversations from its characters to progress the story. Characters provide the players with tasks, some necessary to complete the game and others optional, which are logged as a to-do list in a PDA menu. Completion of tasks requires simple point-and-click interactions with objects in the game, with some tasks involving small puzzles or minigames, such as cleaning a room through a Tetris-based minigame. Optional interactive minigames can be played in an arcade on the Fedora.

During the peak of the Cold War in the 1970s, the space ship Fedora I, controlled by the All Water corporation, was sent from Earth to find a planet for humankind to colonise. Drifting for over two hundred years, the ship encounters a solar flare and is stranded at the bottom of an alien ocean on an uninhabitable planet, where it has remained for another fifty years.

The player is Harold, a shy and withdrawn maintenance worker on the staff of the ship, who assists the scientist Jeanna Mareaux, who is commissioned to look for ways to escape the planet. Harold also performs odd jobs for the other inhabitants, many with different philosophies, including their views on whether to leave the Fedora or stay.

Harold Halibut was created by Slow Bros., a Cologne studio led by independent developer Onat Hekimoğlu, a filmmaker and graduate of the Cologne Game Lab. The development process for the game took place over ten years, with the development team first working on the game on a part-time basis with low funding, and developing in size and commitment as a full-time project over time. In 2012, the initial three-person development team conceived the idea from a conversation about the potential to create a narrative-led video game using stop-motion animation, citing inspiration from classic adventure games and films including Jason and the Argonauts and The Valley of Gwangi. The team also were interested in the use of hand-made assets and stop-motion as they lacked experience in 3D modelling, preferring to leverage their skills of carpentry, sculpture, lighting and costume design to create a game.

To create and animate the assets for the game, the development team hand-made puppets, sets, props, and costumes from various materials including clay, textiles, welded metal, and recycled wood. These items were then rendered in 3D using photogrammetry by photographing the objects from all angles, animated as "digitally rigged" puppets and imported into the Unity engine. To animate the characters, motion capture was used through a motion tracking rig, which filmed the movements of actors and fit them to the models of the 3D puppets. This approach was taken instead of the originally intended approach of using stop-motion animation for characters to streamline the production process, as art director Ole Tillman stated the original approach was "too restrictive" and time-consuming.

According to review aggregator Metacritic, Harold Halibut received "mixed or average" reviews from critics. Fellow review aggregator OpenCritic assessed that the game received fair approval, being recommended by 58% of critics.

Reviewers praised the visual presentation of the game, also noting its scope and ambition. Describing the graphics as a "monument to craft", Edge noted the game's "remarkable technical wizardry" and "authentically traditional" design, comparing it to Aardman stop-motion animation. Rollin Bishop of GamesRadar+ praised the "charming" models for their "tangible" design and meticulous attention detail, although finding the models to have "awkward" and unintended movements in their animation. Describing the game's visuals as an "undeniable technical achievement", Daniel Bueno of Siliconera commended the game's "unique" visuals for their "crisp look".