Developer Gradual Bros. will not be afraid of leaving its fingerprints throughout its debut sport, Harold Halibut. And I imply that actually: Each character, texture, piece of furnishings, article of clothes, floorboard, button, door, and even the screws that maintain all the things collectively had been bodily crafted by the builders after which digitally scanned right into a 3D sport. In reality, in case you look carefully sufficient, you might even see an precise single eyelash hair pressed into the clay cheek of one of many sport’s characters. This handmade type may, after all, recommend that it could be animated utilizing cease movement, very like Wallace and Gromit or Pingu, however that is not the case in any respect. As an alternative, Harold Halibut’s handmade world is rendered in real-time with the movement and fluidity of any trendy 3D sport.
The result’s hanging and even lifelike regardless of being cartoonish in its nature, and immediately distinguishes Harold Halibut as one of the graphically fascinating video games coming this yr. Exploring the world of Harold Halibut is like wanting into an intricate dollhouse (or, on this case, a spaceship submerged underwater), the place its collectible figurines breathe and mosey via their routines with uncanny human-like qualities. You’d suppose that its distinct type was deliberately crafted from the beginning of its growth, however actually, its handcrafted visuals had been an answer to an issue. The issue? Gradual Bros. had no thought the way to make 3D graphics, nor did they even know the way to make a sport. In consequence, founder/director Onat Hekimoglu did the one factor that made sense to him so as to begin constructing out the imaginative and prescient of his online game thought: make it by hand.
Onat’s imaginative and prescient began 14 years in the past in his kitchen, the place he started constructing fashions and units of a retro-future wherein a colony of people leaves Earth through the Chilly Conflict, on the point of its nuclear destruction, for a 200-year journey aboard a spaceship to hunt a brand new planet to dwell on. The brand new world, nonetheless, is devoid of any landmass and utterly fabricated from water. With nowhere to go, the spaceship, generally known as the FEDORA, crashes onto the planet, plunging its occupants into the depths of this watery planet which they have to now discover a technique to colonize.
