Some of my favourite collections of music of all time are concept albums. I love being taken on an exciting and fantastic journey like in The Flaming Lips’ Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots or just give myself into a vibe via Grimes’ Miss Anthropocene. Hell, I’ll argue to my dying breath that Danger Days is My Chemical Romance’s crowning work for how completely and entrancingly it draws you into its world. None of this is to say that Goodbye Volcano High fits into the category of a concept album, but rather that it approaches the same goal from a different direction. Instead of using music to give life to a story, it pulls you into a story that gives meaning to its music. Its songs carry weight not because of their place and purpose in a curated tracklist but because of their personal importance and the experiences that shape them.
Those experiences belong largely to Fang, the game’s teenage lead who we’re introduced to as a teen like any other – wrestling with their identity, their relationships, their goals and overall purpose. As vocalist and de facto leader of garage-level musical trio, Worm Drama, Fang’s aspirations at this stage in their life lie firmly with making it big in the music scene. It’s something that feels, at least to them, as sure and crucial a thing as their bestie Trish’s future career in entomology or classmate Naomi’s passion for engineering. Between the societal pressure of college application season, living up to their straight-laced brother Naser and keeping the peace with staunchly traditional parents who are seemingly unwilling to acknowledge their chosen identity, Fang’s got it tough enough as is. And then there’s the asteroid.
Because, well, in case you’ve somehow made it here without any background on the game whatsoever – Goodbye Volcano High’s cast of characters are all anthropomorphic dinosaurs and their story takes place in the weeks and days before that asteroid hits.
Aside from affording it a plot device and level of suspense that Hitchcock would be proud of, Volcano High’s setting is generally inspired. The team at KO_OP haven’t just drawn everyone as angsty teen scalies and called it a day, but really sold the town of Caldera as somewhere that dino-people would live out very human lives with folks who get out of bed every day, wipe the cat-sized bugs off their windshields, listen to Pangea in the Morning and debate the prevalence of mammals around the water cooler. Fang and their brother Naser are pterodactyls, but along the way you’ll also meet velociraptors, parasaurolophus, aquilops and more.
Goodbye Volcano High’s six-ish-hour story is told predominantly through dialogue-driven animated scenes, peppered with very occasional interactive gimmicks. Like most games of its kind, the biggest gameplay conceit here is allowing players to shape certain aspects of the narrative by regularly choosing how Fang thinks and responds to the people and situations around them. This one’s somewhat unique in that it never stops moving, coming off more like a very bingeable animated serial with a real-time call and response mechanic than a video game, and it really works. Despite the solemn subject matter and meandering, slice-of-life sensibilities of its direction there’s a sense of pace here that’s missing in similar games.
The entire presentation is truly something else. Aesthetically it’s wonderful in still frames and could’ve easily gotten by on a bare minimum visual novel-level production, but it’s animated and directed to perfection. Remove the inputs and let it play out as a limited series on Netflix and it wouldn’t feel an inch out of place – in fact I’d watch the shit out of it.
That’s partially thanks to a generous helping of rhythm-based musical sequences sprinkled over the course of the story as Fang writes and performs music both solo and with Worm Drama. Other, similar games like the recent We Are OFK, only where that game laid out a complete EP via music video-esque minigames bookmarking its chapters, Goodbye Volcano High’s sequence are woven organically into its story and feel distinctly like performances complete with simple but engaging rhythm game mechanics. Importantly, all of the tracks within are fantastic, and because Fang is writing a lot of these songs over the course of the game – sometimes even with loose input from the player – you’re getting an actual, real-time understanding of the meaning and importance in their conception. It feels, and sounds, quite special.
It’s helped along by the aforementioned fantastic music with contributions from Omar Dabbous and Brigitte Naggar as well as a stellar voice cast absolutely nailing their respective performances bolstered by sharp dialogue throughout that does the seemingly impossible and makes these dino-teens sound like actual teens.
The game is also wonderfully LGBTQIA+ forward, painting its diverse cast with every colour of the rainbow without leaning on queer issues as easy fodder for its stories. Quiet moments where characters are allowed to have earnest conversations about things like growing up queer and shrinking themselves to make the folks around them feel at ease, feel equal parts spontaneous and earned, letting you into the mutli-faceted challenges facing these youngsters outside of the ball of death from space and doing it without asking for pity or point-scoring.
One of my favourite things that Goodbye Volcano High does, excellent writing aside, is make full use of the impact and potential of its systems. Rather than just present its players with dialogue boxes and options to pick from, KO_OP understands that video games as a medium have more dimensions. The usual palette of dialogue options is routinely interrupted, restructured or animated to communicate how these inner thoughts feel in Fang’s mind, how they change in real-time as remarks made sink in and how scattered and unintelligible in their multiplicity conversational thoughts can really be inside an anxious mind. Though I’d be loath to spoil any by describing them, there were multiple moments throughout that had me thinking woah, that was cool at something as simple as a dialogue box.
I’ll admit I gave it a mental eye roll when it was first introduced as a mechanic, if only because it’s been done, but the way that Goodbye Volcano High uses its D&D stand-in, Legend & Lore, as a narrative device to debrief and re-establish everyone’s headspace both in-story and for the player while still being its own choice (and chance) driven experience is also really, really neat. I only lament the lack of any kind of chapter replay preventing me from going back and re-exploring these genuinely fun moments and seeking out every potential outcome.
For everything that’s great about this game, there are definite issues that are mostly forgivable but still unfortunately hard to ignore. I’ve had the gamut of issues from button prompts with incorrect labels to scenes abruptly ending and skipping ahead out of nowhere, subtitles routinely being wrong or full of errors, PlayStation trophies not unlocking among others. None of it ever halted my progress or ruined the experience, but the frequency of issues means I was consistently pulled out of the experience and reminded that I was playing a video game. Like the lack of a chapter select, the option to go back and replay (or just enjoy) the music sequences would’ve been incredibly welcome.