The Meteor is The Metaphor, But Also Literal? Goodbye Volcano High Review
The move from high school to college, the first moment we collectively consider a move into adulthood, has been the foundation of countless coming-of-age stories. It’s a perceived loss of our childhood freedoms, plunged into the adult life of responsibility where dreams seem to crumble into dust. That can feel like the end of the world. For Fang, it might actually be.
In a small town in Pangaea, life is not unlike ours. Teenagers drive to school, hang out after class with their friends, post quippy content on social media, engage in hobbies like music or games, and contemplate the potential coming apocalypse. Except here, everyone is anthropomorphic dinosaur people, and global warming is swapped out for an oncoming meteor that could wipe out life on Earth. So, not really that much different.
Aspiring musician Fang has had a bad year, and that’s before news of dinosaur-kind’s doom rears its head. They can’t seem to get their music career off the ground, their band Worm Drama is seemingly falling apart when the other members — tabletop nerd Reed and the pet-obsessed Trish — are losing interest in favor of collegiate pursuits, their family is having trouble adapting to their new nonbinary identity, and a secret admirer from school starts texting them. Whether or not the meteor hits, life after high school might as well be oblivion if Fang can’t go full-time with a musical career.
Right off the bat, the art style is a striking hybrid of animated teenage drama seen in the likes of Daria or 6teen, mixed with the pastel animal designs that would be right at home for a young artist on Tumblr. The latter, beyond its stylistic choice, serves the core doomsday metaphor hovering over the heads of its cast. Whether the world is the one this Earth left behind countless millions of years ago, or simply an alternate version of it doesn’t really matter. Like us, the students of Volcano High wrestle with their day-to-day difficulties of growing up, while imagining if their lives still had worth when society is on the brink of collapse.
Goodbye Volcano High tells its story entirely within this 2D-animated presentation, using a system of mixing-and-matching bespoke pose and expression sets along with basic mouth visemes for dialogue, not unlike the sorts of economic approaches that large western RPGs like Mass Effect or The Witcher have deployed in the past to account for their scale. This allowed developer KO_OP room for massive ambition in storytelling scope, though this animation system can often buckle under its own weight as characters pop between animation states, are in the wrong pose, or outright skip dialogue.
Bugs aside (not counting the one Trish keeps as a pet), rarely has a narrative-focused game gone so far with 2D animation like this, where others opt for still images or the comparative flexibility of 3D animation like in similar series such as Life is Strange. With more hand-touches and no narrative branching, Goodbye Volcano High’s production value is impressive enough on its own that it could have been a TV miniseries instead.
The interactive side of GVH manifests as dialogue choices for Fang, and band sequences that play out like a lightweight rhythm game. While the surface presentation shifts between in-person conversations, text messaging, or the short D&D sessions that play out like affectionate parody, the primary interaction is choosing between various — usually 3 — dialogue responses for Fang.
This system is a bit more playful than other narrative games with dialogue branches, which leads into what will be one of Goodbye Volcano High’s most divisive decisions beyond its offbeat art style: the player has to operate within Fang’s point of view, and influencing them often comes down to how someone like them might handle the situation. Being a teenager going through massive upheaval in their life, Fang is still a fundamentally flawed person and that comes across in their emotional capacity.
In most dialogue choice moments, the interface for choosing a response can morph depending on the situation and Fang’s current mood. A dialogue bubble might glow to indicate excitement, or change shape to a shiny rectangular block to indicate Fang’s tendency towards sharp, sarcastic remarks. Choices can require extra button presses when Fang has to muster a pained earnestness, and some might flicker out completely if Fang changes their mind mid-decision.
When the going gets really tough for Fang, every choice can feel like the wrong one. In a fight with their brother Naser over him taking down their band posters from the school, a player might only get the choice to have Fang call him an asshole, rip into him for his manufactured persona of integrity, or bring up his lack of friends. It never feels good to have to choose between Fang’s worst impulses, and many players might feel like they have little ability to influence the story during these painful moments, but the game never allows straying from who Fang is fundamentally as a person. This is someone who can barely keep themself together at this time of life, and it should be expected that they’re not going to come at every situation with delicacy or tact.
While the bulk of the game doesn’t have significant branching in events based on choice, like Night in the Woods letting players choose which characters to spend time with, all the little choices manifest in what Fang has learned about each character over the story and how capable they can be in connecting with them during each of their toughest moments late in the game. It’s here, where Fang starts to bring down their emotional walls and realize the people important to them, that the decisions made begin to manifest in Fang as a character and their relationships with others.
There isn’t a lot of subtlety to the theming and character arcs of Goodbye Volcano High, but the writing never beats the player over the head and has the confidence in them to read the subtext. Small character expressions, a quiet moment of pause, or a shift in camera perspective can mean a lot when the developers execute such a confident grasp of narrative pacing and presentation.
Not every character gets as much time as they need to flesh out their personalities and individual struggles, but the writing is so strong on this front that it wouldn’t be an overstatement to say that it’s GVH’s biggest strength. Naomi keeping herself busy to distract from her fear of the future, Stella trying to be an emotional wall for others at her own expense, Sage putting up an air of optimism to hide their insecurity, Rosa wearing herself out trying to keep people together, Naser’s indecision between what he wants and what’s expected of him. Over the days spent with and around these people, the player gets an understanding of who they all are, their connections with Fang, and their connections with each other.
The central relationship between Fang, Reed, and Trish forms the bedrock of the story and is where the writing is at its strongest. Them and their friendship is believably brought to life through their honesty with each other, and collective personal history which informs their behavior around one another. Seeing the two of them growing into different people informs Fang’s fear over their life changing beyond their control, but what ultimately leads them to realize that their friendship is stronger than anything the universe can throw at them, even a world-destroying meteor.
It’d be a disservice to not bring up the soundtrack by Dabu, with lyrics by Brigitte Naggar and Lachlan Watson. Their score lends the game its airy, dreamlike quality, and the original songs give each band sequence a tremendous sense of narrative weight. The emotional conveyance gives truth to when Fang talks about how important music is to them, and how much the joy of creation and performance lifts them up.
And the voice performances are remarkably well-done, especially considering the amount of relative unknowns in the central cast. A standout is definitely Abe Bueno-Jallad as Naser, giving the character a sensitive goofball affect that contributes to some of the best moments in the story.
After the tremendous impact of the game’s final moments, it was thankfully easy to forget the rough path the creative team went through on the way here, between conflicts with original staff or reprehensible reactionary sentiment surrounding it since announcement.
(It should go without saying what I think of the “fan game” that some of these heartless types put together in advance of the release. I hope it fades out into irrelevance, an unsightly footnote in the actual game’s history.)
Goodbye Volcano High isn’t the most polished, or most fun, or most spectacular game of this year. It’s got a fair share of technical issues, there aren’t many substantial ways of affecting the narrative through player choice, and that art style will remain justifiably divisive despite the scale of its production. It will likely continue to have detractors that come at the game in bad faith for no other reason than it very clearly wearing its queer themes on its sleeve, because our world is not a very nice one to outsider media.
As a recent sentiment goes, however, an artistic work that’s rough yet undeniably distinct can be worth more than even the most polished but standard artworks. In an unmistakably strong year for games, Goodbye Volcano High stands as one of its hidden gems and a landmark in the narrative gaming space.
