168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Harold Halibut is notable for being a full-length video game made entirely using stop-motion animation. While that’s certainly the hook that got my attention when I first heard about the game eight years ago, I'm struck by the fact that it's also one of the only video games to excel at using montage.
Harold Halibut Shows There's More Than One Way To Be "Cinematic"
As much as video games have been influenced by Hollywood, there are many elements of film language that have never really made the jump between mediums. When we talk about a game being “cinematic,” we're using vague language to encompass many elements of its presentation.
Hellblade's Continuous Camera Works Far Better Than God Of War's
Senua andﷺ Kratos are both followed by an uꦗnbroken shot, but Senua's comes with a far more powerful purpose.
168澳洲幸运5开奖网:The Last of Us Part 2 is “cinematic” because its story's emotional heft relies on the nuances of its actors, captured in all their subtlety through impressive performance capture work, and framed by cutscene artists for maximum impact. 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:God of War is “cinematic” in a different way, applying the long-take style of Birdman, Rope, and "" to a narrative video game. But cinematic style isn't solely the domain of big-budget triple-A games. 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Kentucky Route Zero is just as “cinematic,” using well-considered compositions to sell its haunted ﷺportrait of 21st-century American l🌳ife.
Harold Halibut Overcomes The Many Challenges Of Montage
Still, there are some elements that are more difficult to realize given the limitations of technology. Jump cuts, for example, are still fairly rare in video games. Though indies like Virginia and Thirty Flights of Loving have used the technique to switch instantaneously from one scene to another, it wasn't an easy trick to pull off in the time before every console had an SSD. 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart made these transitions a core game mechanic by introducing a rift gun that let you instantly transport between dimensions, but even an unshowy cut between two quiet scenes was difficult before the PS5 and Xbox Series X. If these moments were non-interactive, they could be pre-rendered, but pulling it off when the player was in cont♈rol was a big ask.
These same technical constraints make montage tricky, too. In film, montage is a shortcut. I don't mean that pejoratively; it's simply an efficient way to convey a wealth of information in a brief timeframe. Want the audience to understand that two characters are falling in love? You can cut together a bunch of scenes of them hanging out, put them in a few different outfits, add a great needledrop, and voila! Seasons have passed and your characters have fallen for each other without a single line of dialogue.
Theoretically, video games could use montage the same way, but the difficulty of pulling it off seems to have weighed more heavily on developers ✅than its benefit as a narrative shorthand. While in film, shots are simply assembled on a physical reel or in a digital timeline, a video game has to quickly load up each environment.💟 As a result, most games avoid this kind of rapid-fire storytelling.
Varied Screenshots From The Same Montage In Harold Halibut
Harold Halibut And The Art Of Playing With Time
Harold Halibut doesn't, and frequently employs montage as a way to speed up or slow down time as needed. Without getting into spoiler territory, the game employs a counter to show how many days have passed since the spaceship, Fedora I, landed on the mysterious alien planet. Later on, another timer is added, this one counting down the days until an important future event.
When you ⛦look at that timer, you might think you know how much of the game you have left. Bꦏut montage allows Harold Halibut to throw curveballs, skipping over a few days or even a few weeks at once.
This approach to montage makes for some moody moments, sometimes melancholy, so🦄metimes lightly m♎enacing.
It's something that other games should work to include. Harold Halibut allows the game to "yada yada" over periods that are less important to the story, while another game might be stuck in the moment with no logical way to escape. Sure, The Last of Us uses its seasonal structure to move from important event to important event, but both God of War games consign themselves to moving through Atreus and Kratos' story in strict chronological order. Using montage could allow the game to keep to its one-take style, while condensing the time that passes, and it could work well for other games, too. Games have needed to get shorter for years now and montage is a clear artistic path to all killer, no filler.
Harold Halibut Understands The Poꦐwer Of One-ꦆOff Moments
The stop-motion video game pulled out all the stops to deliver a magical expeꦦrience.
