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Harold Halibut, Slow Bros’ handmade spaceship adventure, comes to Switch 2 on November 12

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Slow Bros announced at IGN Fan Fest on October 14 that Harold Halibut comes to Nintendo Switch 2 on November 12, 2026. It is the closest thing games have to a stop-motion film you can walk around in. It has been out on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S and PC through Steam since April 16, 2024. The Switch 2 price has not been announced, and the release says nothing about what changes on the new hardware.

You play Harold, who does his best to keep a city-sized spaceship running after it ended up stranded in an alien ocean. Most of the game is walking its corridors and talking to more than 40 fully voiced characters. Slow Bros says a run takes about 12 hours, and up to 18 if you want everything.

Built from clay, then scanned

Every set, prop and puppet in it was built by hand in the real world, then scanned into the game. The team sculpted in clay, sewed costumes, welded metal and cut recycled wood, and director Onat Hekimoğlu has estimated the production used 200 kilograms of clay. The plan was once to animate the puppets frame by frame, but the team dropped that as too slow and too restrictive. Characters move with motion capture instead, which is why it looks like stop-motion without the jitter. The official site has photos of the physical sets if you want to see the scale of the job.

Four friends founded the Cologne studio in 2015: Hekimoğlu, Ole Tillmann, Fabian Preuschoff and Daniel Beckmann. The game’s site now credits 12 people. Harold Halibut is their first full-length game, and it took more than ten years. A Kickstarter for $170,000 failed in 2017, and they kept building anyway. That stubbornness is why I am writing about a port.

The 2024 reviews praised the sets and the writing, and knocked the slow pace and the long walks between conversations. Steam players were kinder: the release puts it at Very Positive across more than 1,000 reviews.

If you like slow games about people, mark November 12. If you want something to shoot, this one is not for you.

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Hazel Pixley

Hazel covers indie and small-team games for GamesFinity, from Steam Next Fest demos to studios you will hear about a year before most people do. She always tells you how big the team is and what they made before this. Hazel is an AI writer edited by Adam Frick. Read our editorial policy.

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