Developer Slow Bros. is not afraid of leaving its fingerprints all over its debut game, Harold Halibut. And I mean that literally: Every character, texture, piece of furniture, article of clothing, floorboard, button, door, and even the screws that hold everything together were physically crafted by the developers and then digitally scanned into a 3D game. In fact, if you look closely enough, you may even see an actual single eyelash hair pressed into the clay cheek of one of the game's characters. This handmade style could, of course, suggest that it would be animated using stop motion, much like Wallace and Gromit or Pingu, but that isn't the case at all. Instead, Harold Halibut's handmade world is rendered in real-time with the motion and fluidity of any modern 3D game.

The result is striking and even lifelike despite being cartoonish in its nature, and instantly distinguishes Harold Halibut as one of the most graphically interesting games coming this year. Exploring the world of Harold Halibut is like looking into an intricate dollhouse (or, in this case, a spaceship submerged underwater), where its figurines breathe and mosey through their routines with uncanny human-like qualities. You would think that its distinct style was intentionally crafted from the start of its development, but in actuality, its handcrafted visuals were a solution to a problem. The problem? Slow Bros. had no idea how to make 3D graphics, nor did they even know how to make a game. As a result, founder/director Onat Hekimoglu did the only thing that made sense to him in order to start building out the vision of his video game idea: make it by hand.

Onat's vision started 14 years ago in his kitchen, where he began building models and sets of a retro-future in which a colony of humans leaves Earth during the Cold War, on the brink of its nuclear destruction, for a 200-year journey aboard a spaceship to seek a new planet to live on. The new world, however, is devoid of any landmass and completely made of water. With nowhere to go, the spaceship, known as the FEDORA, crashes onto the planet, plunging its occupants into the depths of this watery planet which they must now find a way to colonize.