Puppets Meet Planets In ‘Harold Halibut,’ A Striking Indie Game Due Out Soon

A new three-minute preview has dropped for Harold Halibut, a long-gestating indie game that looks as quirky as its title sounds.

The trailer fleshes out the storyline of the sci-fi adventure game, which is set among a marooned colony of spacefaring humans. Watch it below:

Harold Halibut is the first full-length video game from Slow Bros., an indie studio based in Cologne, Germany. The idea was sparked in 2012 “as a conversation over dinner about our love of stop motion and story games,” say the developers. “It wasn’t long after that we started building dollhouse-sized sets and puppets in our bedrooms.”

The game doesn’t use stop-motion animation as such. The elements are built in the real world then 3d-scanned, and the game uses the resulting digital assets. The team say stop motion serves as a guiding influence on the project, and a touch of Wes Anderson’s Isle of Dogs can certainly be felt in the design.

In a 2018 interview with Unity, whose engine they are using, the developers delved into their process. When they embarked on the project, they said, “none of us could actually do any game-related stuff … and also none of us was a 3d artist or a 2d artist.” Once they started building sets and puppets, “we soon realized that especially character design and modeling puppets was much more difficult.”

The game is due to come out “soonish” on PC, Playstation 4, and Xbox One.