Harold Halibut's stop motion and strange alien city continues to look absolutely gorgeous

At this year's Future Games Show, we got another sneak peek at the upcoming stop-motion adventure Harold Halibut. We've previously seen a short trailer released earlier this year showcasing the game's gorgeous art style, but this time developers Slow Bros. take us through more story details of their post-apocalyptic adventure.

Up until now, we've been mostly in the dark about how humanity ended up 20,000 leagues beneath an alien sea, but now we have a little more insight. Turns out, 250 years ago, a spaceship filled with humans left Earth on the verge of the cold war to find another planet. It looks like something on the ship's voyage went wrong, forcing it to settle in less than hospitable circumstances.

You play Harold, a lab assistant to the spaceship's lead scientist who is trying to find a way to get the ship unstuck and back into space, even though many of the ship's inhabitants have come to peace with their underwater life.

The trailer shows Harold wandering about the ship, which the devs say you can explore a majority of right at the beginning of the game. It looks spectacular, and knowing that every detail was handmade makes Harold Halibut all the more impressive. I can imagine myself exploring the entire ship for the first hour completely ignoring the story altogether and just chatting to the ship's "wonderfully weird" characters. The last of humanity seems like a quirky bunch, which makes sense seeing as most of them led closed-off lives, raised on a city-sized spaceship trapped underwater.

Every second of new footage released of Harold Halibut is always a treat, and that looks like all we're getting until the game releases on PC "sometime soon."

Rachel had been bouncing around different gaming websites as a freelancer and staff writer for three years before settling at PC Gamer back in 2019. She mainly writes reviews, previews, and features, but on rare occasions will switch it up with news and guides. When she's not taking hundreds of screenshots of the latest indie darling, you can find her nurturing her parsnip empire in Stardew Valley and planning an axolotl uprising in Minecraft. She loves 'stop and smell the roses' games—her proudest gaming moment being the one time she kept her virtual potted plants alive for over a year.