TTick, tick. In the dripping confines of Fedora 1, an aquatic space colony with an exquisite retro-futuristic design, it is time, not water, that exerts undeniable pressure on its inhabitants. A cataclysmic meteor looms on the horizon, threatening to wipe them out. But these endearingly eccentric characters, including the titular Harold, are in no hurry for anyone, preferring to spend their days wandering down the barrel of cosmic disaster.

It’s no surprise that a leisurely-paced adventure game like Harold Halibut was created by a team that takes a similarly slow approach to time. It’s been 14 years since game director Onat Hekimoglu came up with his first idea for his game while studying for his master’s degree in his lab in Cologne. At the time, it was a weird point-and-click adventure with pristine stop-motion visuals. Elements of that version still exist today, with the main character, Harold, a melancholy caretaker who spends his days looking out to sea. But over the years, the game has become more mechanically sophisticated, narratively expansive, and visually beautiful.

Well, Harold Halibut is a wonderful blend of analog and virtual, with so much tactility and convincing textures that you find yourself reaching for the screen at various points while playing the game. You may want to physically touch them.

Hekimoglu, who studied film before video games, notes this eerie quality, saying Harold Halibut is a game with “stylized” visuals that paradoxically seem “photorealistic.” Masu. Establishing the aesthetic took two years of intensive experimentation. Initially, it was a true stop-motion game made of puppets, with every frame painstakingly recorded on camera. However, Hekimoglu said, “Having his 2D sprite of his character stop motion on top of a beautifully lit photographic background didn’t feel right. There was no sense of unity. “. So his small team of four from his two studios in Cologne turned to this approach: The finished game, which involves manipulating figures around a complex virtual playset, feels as if it was created by Wes Anderson running wild at Aardman Animations. Art director Ole Tillman, who studied illustration at the Rhode Island School of Design before working at Disney, finds great joy in making dolls, rebuilding “broken connections from childhood” in the process. did. Simply placing a puppet in a room while devising a story allowed the imaginations of Tillman, Hekimogul, and studio co-founders Fabian Prusov and Daniel Beckman to stretch in unexpected directions.

Like classic sci-fi films like Solaris, the game’s drama unfolds on a macrocosmic and microcosmic scale, delving into the inner lives of its eccentric cast as they ponder the universe’s biggest questions. . In one sequence, Harold cries out as he cleans a giant filtration pump, and in that moment he transforms from a man who does a boring job without complaining to a man with long-repressed emotions. You can see it changing. This sweet and tender scene sets up the rest of the game. Harold searches for the meaning of his life in a surprisingly cozy corner of the universe.

As development progressed, the technology behind Harold Halibut gradually improved as the team moved funds from one pot to another, working on ad-hoc contracts.Under experiment photogrammetry During the project phase, “it was clear that Unity had limitations.” [the software used to make the game]” says Hekimoglu. The lights were off. The engine couldn’t handle huge HD scans. However, in 2015, physically-based rendering arrived, making objects in games look more realistic. Another major software update brought the team closer to…

Tillman recalls that Harold Halibut’s unconventional development was the opposite of most games. “People typically start with the technical limitations and adapt their creative decisions to that,” he says. “We came up with the concept of world-building, the way things looked, the mood, the lighting, the atmosphere, his art very early on. And then it took a long time. [technology] To get closer to it. He says the team has now reached a satisfactory conclusion that “it looks exactly as we envisioned it a long time ago.”

It’s been 14 years since Hekimoglu’s original concept, but it would be inaccurate to say that Harold Halibut has ever been in the doldrums. development hell. Rather, this group of artists, outsiders to the video game industry, continued to work steadily, following a completely different commercial logic and on a completely different schedule. To be sure, there were some bad points as well. The mutual termination of his contract with publisher Curve Games, the coronavirus pandemic, and a crisis with his team that he says has reached a “breaking point.”

But events like these energized the group, Tillman said. For several months, the team vowed to each other, “No matter what happened, we would see it through to the end,” with the same determination as our unlikely hero, Harold.