The Importance Of A Good Gaming Menu

Harold Halibut is a game that uses three and a half buttons. On an Xbox controller, you press Y to open the menu, B to exit the menu, and A to interact with things, either in menus or the wider world of Fedora 1. You use the joystick to walk about at Harold’s casual pace, but that’s not a button, right? The half button is the left trigger, which you press to zoom in on Harold’s face as a pseudo-photo mode. Despite the simplicity of the control scheme and the complete lack of mechanical depth, I love Harold Halibut with all my heart.

I’ve described it this way before, but Harold Halibut is like a playable Wes Anderson movie, complete with stop-motion animation and a quirky cast. From eccentric inventor Cyrus, who’s in a decades-long feud with fellow scientist Professor Mareaux about their differing methods of archiving, to laid-back, kimono-wearing Tinnerbaum, and a captain-at-large who’s lost his only friend, a bird named Coco, I could easily see Bill Murray, Jason Schwartzman, and Tilda Swinton fitting right in.

I love exploring the confines of this weird, submerged spacecraft. I love having odd conversations with the ship’s stir crazy crew. I love seeing fish swim past the windows holding handwritten banners proclaiming the freedom of the ocean, because apparently they have gained sentience and the ability to hold a pen.

But most of all, I love the details. The little store rooms filled with retrofuturistic rubbish. The elevator underneath the captain-at-large’s pilot seat. The natural distrust in the fish that’s served up for dinner. And my favourite of these details is the game’s menu.

The game’s menu is diegetic, viewable on a funky PDA device designed in the same retrofuturistic style as the rest of the Fedora 1. Pressing one of those three buttons pulls it up and shows an old-school screen, green with LEDs and a typeface ripped straight from a Casio calculator. The left-hand side of the screen has your menu options – check your to-do list or read your messages – and the right-hand side is a notebook. A proper, paper notebook, on which Harold scribbles little doodles of what’s going on in the story. It’s a glorious dichotomy of digital and analogue, and rifling through the pages is immensely satisfying.

However, there’s a third option on that digital Casio menu. Add-ons. I flicked to this, imagining Harold’s plasticine hand twisting a clunky knob or tapping a chunky button. If only Microsoft made a retrofuturistic Xbox controller…

The add-on systems are as follows: Doculates, Core Ruptorials, and Toast in Space. None of these do anything. All of these do everything. Let me explain. These options have no gameplay purpose (yet). They don’t do anything. But they look fantastic, and help build the world of the Fedora 1 better than most games manage in their entire runtime.

Selecting Core Ruptorials brings up some kind of bar chart and two circular graphs, slowly spinning. These represent the Central Torcuts, apparently. I don’t know what these words mean (because they’re gobbledegook) and I don’t need to. It’s some kind of diagnostic, writ in vibrant yellow, blue, and spot highlights of neon green. I don’t know if these scores are good or not, but presumably there would be more flashing red lights if something was wrong.

The same goes for Doculates. This option brings up four shapes, shaded with thick, yellow lines. The circle, diamond, square, and star clearly represent things, but I don’t have a clue what those things are. I’m not sure Harold does, either. Professor Mareaux might.

It doesn’t matter that it’s all meaningless. It’s menu decoration. It’s a little extra detail that sells you on Harold Halibut’s world, that immerses you in life aboard the Fedora 1. And more games should do this. I didn’t even realise I was sick of menus that are just a pause screen until I experienced something better, something more. I want funky buttons that don’t do anything, I want a device that feels at home in the game it exists within. And I want one of Harold’s PDA devices in real life, so I can stare at wibbling graphs until I fall asleep.