Handmade stop-motion adventure Harold Halibut still looks so intriguing

As if making games weren’t labor-intensive enough, upcoming adventure game Harold Halibut is made with characters and sets built by hand. Harold’s retro-future space adventure is full of metal and textiles and little clay folks with intricate faces. A new story trailer for the adventure game gives a proper long look at all the lovely handcrafting and dives into the story of humanity’s escape to space during the Cold War.

“It’s been 250 years since your home—an ark-like spaceship—fled an Earth on the verge of cold war to find a habitable planet on which to preserve the human race,” say the developers Slow Bros. “You are Harold, a young lab assistant for the ship’s lead scientist, Jeanne Mareaux. While most of the ship’s inhabitants have reconciled themselves to a life lived aboard the sunken ship, Mareaux still works tirelessly to find a way for the ship to leave the planet and find a new, dryer home.”

Harold and Mareaux dig even deeper into the mystery in this here new story trailer. It seems there’s more to the planet they crash landed on than they’d originally known.

“Harold Halibut started life as a conversation over dinner about our love of stop-motion and story games,” Slow Bros. say. “It wasn’t long after that we started building dollhouse sized sets and puppets in our bedrooms. The result is a cross between game and stop motion film.”

All the environements in the trailer are so neat and intricate looking. The control room up top there with its bright colors and tiny lights are one thing. The little details are equally cool, like the funky ceiling in the disco or the tiny paper lantern lighting Mareaux’s home.

Even without the impressive dedication of its handmade humans, Harold sounds like an intriguing adventure. I’m almost always up for a bit of retro-futurism and a mystery about human civilization stranded in space. Pile on the fully voice-acted characters and the synthwave-y music and it sure seems like one worth watching out for.

Harold Halibut doesn’t have a release date yet, but you can keep an eye on it over on Steam in the meantime.