Demo Feedback Thread

[SlowBros]

First of all, welcome to our Community Forum. As we approach the launch of Harold Halibut, we will focus more on answering your questions about the game. Of course we are a bit nervous about the current demo release, as it is the first time we present the game to such a big audience. After all these years, there are certainly some expectations…

It would really help us to get your feedback and thoughts on the demo. Especially things you find irritating or that you don’t like (words of encouragement are also nice, of course). Please leave your feedback here and help us shape Harold Halibut to it’s full potential before the release.

[The Minted Lady]

I enjoyed the demo. The characters are like puppets without strings and there's something truly enchanting about that animation style. But I will echo something that others have said: For some reason I see some sort of artifacting/animation when Harold moves. It's like his legs or head are in a blur. It's not all the time, and maybe it depends on what I'm moving in front of. But this was an odd graphical glitch I kept running into.

On top of that, Harold does feel quite "heavy" to move. He could stand to be a bit faster both in walking and running. I mean he clearly is no Buddy and can't run around the arcade as fast as the postal worker, but it would be nice if he had a little more pep in his step.

I also would like the timed choices to give us a little more time. I ran into the police guy and the annoying kid, and kept getting choices to answer the policeman, but the bar for my time limit went by so fast I just chose an answer without even reading the dialogue options.

But overall, I will say that this game looks incredible, and you guys should be proud of the hard work you've put in. There is just something special about hand crafting elements that are then digitized into an interactive interface.

[Dexter]

I think I enjoyed it overall, but not sure if enough to pick up the finished game, we'll see how that turns out.

There’s very little to interact with, like one or two spots in a room, if that. Even in Harold’s room there isn’t a single hotspot to click. Puzzles are also solved automatically by clicking on a hotspot, no inventory or combining items or anything like that. Interesting world lore and visuals, but feels more like an interactive story.

There were also technical issues. Even though I have “Upscaling” disabled, there seems to always be some weird blur/temporal ghosting effect around his legs when he moves and in some other cases like all over in Cutscenes like some sort of AI Upscaling algorithm was running all the time, it’s very annoying. Also Severe texture Popin at times, especially when running. The underwater lab has no textures at all for like 2 seconds if you run into it.

And why do I get 15-40FPS on a 4090? It doesn't look like there's enough graphically to warrant that. Even in the Menu with like nothing to render but the UI it’s 30-40FPS, making me believe there's probably some sort of underlying problem.

Some other minor bugs or annoyances I ran into: Can’t run at AllWaterCorp HQ, sometimes when talking to people (like the Fish Hut guy or the scientist lady) if you aren’t looking at them it takes a while for the character to turn and it kind of looks like the game hung up for like 10-20 seconds.

[cee]

Had an absolutely wonderful time play the demo, loved everything about it. This demo was a real WOW moment that a game managed to pull off this art style so well.

You may be glad to know - I played it in linux (debian) using valve's proton compatibility without any issue or tweaking. Flawless. I played at 1440p. (I did not try on a steam deck).

[Neufr0]

Really loved the demo. Never heard about the game until now so it was a nice surprise. I almost regret watching the trailer afterward because it might have revealed too much of the plot.

Like a lot of people said I had issues with the ghosting effects and the interactions. I also had a bug entering the elevator in the All Waters area where the animation stuck and i had to reload the previous save.

Also a small nitpick. I do like 90% of the dialogues of the game but some interactions between Harold and Mareaux seems a little bit too expositional. Especially after the first broadcast of the Earth message. Why does Harold ask her if she heard the message she was right there lmao. And they keep asking obvious questions until the telephone rings. It would have been so much better if they just had a few sentences stating their opinion about it and shortly after the call of the CEO. It really drags down a very great scene in my opinion.

But apart from that it was great. The demo was very genereous too I believed it would have ended way sooner. Great job and good luck with the rest.

[clip_on_tie]

The demo was glitchy and the ghosting was really annoying. I also found the pace too slow - both the movement to get around, and the speech. I want to speed through the conversations and even when I can use the space bar to skip the line of text, it still has a short lag so I can't jump through the text as quick as I'd like.

Having said that, the game is absolutely stunning. The characters and sets all look amazing, and the attention to detail in the animation is wonderful.

[RustyYi]

（sorry, Google translate）
Items in the game are sometimes strangely blurry, and non-native English speakers can occasionally fail to read textual markings
Character walking is a bit stiff and too slow
Character expressions lack variety
Hope to add the ability to manually save files.
Hope there will be more maps to refer to (and look at).
Spokesperson display doesn't work

I really like the art style of the demo, the style of the worldview you've constructed is very interesting, and it's rare to see a sci-fi work like this one that takes place on a crashed spaceship connected by underwater pipes! The text translation is smooth, the localisation is surprisingly good (I really wanted to praise the translation when listening to the postman say the motto), and the banter of the various NPC's adds a lot of interesting setup, I like to play the game at a slow pace so I had a good time listening to it. For the quest scheduling I thought it was okay, nothing special. I'm looking forward to it, and very much looking forward to seeing the RELEASE!
（原文）
游戏里的物品有时候奇怪的模糊，非英语母语的玩家偶尔会看不清楚文字标识
角色行走有点僵硬而且过于慢了
角色表情缺乏变化
希望能增加手动存档的功能
希望能增加可以参考（和观赏）的地图
显示发言人的功能无效

我很喜欢demo的美术风格，你们构筑的世界观风格十分有意思，很少见到本作这样在水下管道连通的坠毁飞船上发生的科幻作品！文本翻译很通顺，本地化令人惊讶地好（听邮差说格言的时候真的很想表扬翻译），各种npc的闲聊补充了很多有趣的设定，我喜欢慢节奏玩游戏，因此很开心地听完了。对于任务安排我觉得还行，没有什么特别的想法。我很期待，而且非常期待看到成品
love from chinese plyaer

[Ajdar Anık]

- The problem with Harold's slow movement (yes, even with the run button) is that he starts moving slowly, and he turns too slowly. This creates a bit of an unresponsive, or delayed feeling.

- Chromatic aberration gives me headaches in every game that uses it. I'd appreciate an option to turn it off (separate from the rest of the Post FX, preferably). Also, is there something else blurring the corners of the screen, or is it just chromatic aberration?

- When can we expect more of Sonsuz Aşk? All 36 seasons, 3 hours per episode, plus an hour-long summary of the previous episode before each episode; just like a real Turkish telenovela.

[SlowBros]

Originally posted by Ajdar Anık:

- The problem with Harold's slow movement (yes, even with the run button) is that he starts moving slowly, and he turns too slowly. This creates a bit of an unresponsive, or delayed feeling.

- Chromatic aberration gives me headaches in every game that uses it. I'd appreciate an option to turn it off (separate from the rest of the Post FX, preferably). Also, is there something else blurring the corners of the screen, or is it just chromatic aberration?

- When can we expect more of Sonsuz Aşk? All 36 seasons, 3 hours per episode, plus an hour-long summary of the previous episode before each episode; just like a real Turkish telenovela.

Thank you for the input!

We can already assure you that we added an option to turn of Chromatic Aberration in the full version. No more blurring in the corners happening if you don't want to.

[Патриотик]

- Maybe I missed it, but I felt that there's not enough onboarding in the first minutes of the demo. I played on keyboard and had to figure out by myself what button did what. I missed a simple windows that would appear for a few seconds to explain how to sit down, how to zoom in on screen etc. I wanted to immerse myself from the first seconds, but instead I had to figure out the controls by myself which I didn't like.
- I found dialogue skipping a bit jarring, felt like it needed some sort of visual cue even if it is fast-forwarding.
- When you arrive at this first big location with different elevators, I felt some sort of disconnect with how wide everything became and wanted to zoom in on the character so that camera would follow me instead of navigating a zoomed out location. I had to walk up to a thing, zoom in, see all the cool details, then zoom out. Really wish there was an option to zoom in on the character and walk while camera followed at that screen. There's too many interesting details there that I wanted to zoom in on.
- Blue setting menu I thought was just awful to look at. Me eyes literally hurt sorting through that screen.
- When moving the main character, there was some sort of visual trace left behind which felt odd.
- Lots of clipping through environment which broke the immersion for me. It's not exactly a huge open-world thing where you could look over clipping. In an intimate experience like yours lots of character clipping all over the place is impacting my suspension of disbelief in a huge way. Hope you can increase some colliders!

I wrote so many criticisms, because overall I loved it, the game is just great and I'm already a huge fan. This is truly a grounbdreaking experience. I'd wait for a few patches before purchasing it though. The polish is make or break moment for me here, don't want to ruin this immersive experience with small things that could be fixed later.

[Патриотик]

Oh, one more thing: Running option felt too fast for me and walking was too slow. I guess it's hard to describe, but as a big fan of adventure games I immediately noticed that speed was off. Basic walking animation should definitely be faster. Or maybe it's because of the inertia that character moving feels so slow. Anyway, wouldn't want to play through the game if the speed was as slow as it is now.

[Jakkauli]

Please fix the screen/UI scaling. Any time I changed display settings, the window stretched past my screen (imagine a 4K resolution on a 1080p monitor not downscaled)
This affected subtitles aswell. I was using a 4K TV.

[haru.kathy]

Thank you for the demo. I really loved how much you could experience of the game. I can’t wait for the release.
I played all of it and loved it (Played for 115 minutes). The story seems very intriguing and I can sense the possible character arche for Harold and I love it. I can’t wait to learn more about the NPCs as well.
I played with the Nintendo Controller and at some points there were Controler-Informations on the bottom of the right corner. I don’t think that they were supposed to be there (I have a Screenshot if needed 😊)
When I talked to (I think) Number 8 at central station Harold got stuck moving to the “speaking position” and I had to reload the last save-point.
That were the only problems I could see in my run.
If possible, it would be nice to revisit dialog and have a map (I actually love that you have to search for everything and you don’t really know where people are, but for orientation purposes a map would be helpful) but that is cherry-picking.

[Milo Agrado e Tanya Marie]

I played the demo on the preset settings and it crashed right on the agora cutsene ate the beggining after you complete your tasks.

[halfmonkey]

I agree with the awkward player movement, but like the puppet effect. It seems (based on how Harold pilots stairs) that the kinetics are similar to the default Unity model. The wide athletic stance when running up or down the staircase in the Arcade seems contrary to Harold's fitness level. Minor issue, but visually awkward.

What I would like to see in the final game is better funneling into doorways. The constant dead stops and readjustments when not properly aligned to the graphic indicators (a nice touch, btw) could get bothersome in a full length game. (Granted am playing on K&M. Maybe controller movement is smoother, but I don't know.)

Fantastic demo- both for length and quality. Very much looking forward to the full game!

[jodiewils]

"overexposure" type bright white or red screen often when changing scenes or when subtitles are running
unable to open the PDA with switch controller