Harold Halibut review: Floundering around in a watery wonderland

The player will probably at that point be thinking something similar after running a series of mindless fetch quests for the inhabitants of the Fedora, an Ark-like spaceship that long ago escaped a dying Earth only to become trapped beneath the sea of an alien planet.

However, you will undoubtedly have been amusingly distracted up to then by the unique – for a game at least – art style. It’s as if stop-motion animation specialist Aardman had tried its hand at recreating BioShock, with the hand-drawn characters and locations having been scanned and brought to life beautifully. You will have little trouble believing German studio Slow Bros has devoted a decade to this passion project.

Yet its visual flamboyance carries you only so far, as each deadening task loaded onto Harold’s shoulders weighs you down further.

Harold and the other few dozen settlers on the Fedora have come to accept the mundanity of their life, tightly controlled by the faintly sinister but mostly sclerotic bureaucracy that runs the underwater community. But, as in many a sci-fi cliche, Harold eventually suspects the powers-that-be haven’t told everyone the full story of their predicament, so he pursues a breadcrumb of clues.

That perhaps makes it sound more spirited than the reality, since Harold’s agency – and yours – is largely confined to running errands and chatting at great length with the others. The script entertains in fits and starts, enlivened by a cast of British-accented oddballs. Yet you’re never far away from being sent on an extended expedition around the ship as if someone is having a joke at your expense – which on occasion they literally do.

My initial impression was that this periodic monotony was intended to function as a meta-commentary on your job as a dogsbody. But my overriding feeling might just be classed as boredom. You get the sense that a more tightly wound plot with expanded gameplay to hook the player could have turned the Halibut’s tale into a story that could really reel you in.