How ‘Goodbye Volcano High’ Captured My Childhood Experiences
In the Epilogue Gaming community, we have a term called a “Flora Game,” which is typically an indie with a strong artistic and emotional focus, something that targets the niche of games I love the most. When Goodbye Volcano High was first announced, I was inundated with messages correctly observing that this was, more than anything we had seen that day, a Flora Game. I was delighted when I played a demo of Goodbye Volcano High at PAX East in 2023, ensuring that I would, in fact, adore this game as we all thought I would. On so many levels, Goodbye Volcano High feels like a game built around my own lived experiences, one of the most personal games I’ve finished in a long time.
Thematically, Goodbye Volcano High explores tensions between creative aspirations and lifelong friendships, between the magnetic pull of dreams and the self-sabotaging weight of reality. As you might infer from the high school setting embedded in Volcano High’s title, much of this game’s thematic focus takes the classic bildungsroman formula, yet the decision to inject anthropomorphic queer dinosaurs and ambient punk rock as aesthetic particulars was refreshingly engaging for me. I was immediately drawn to the visual design of the world and its characters, the introspective wobble of the music, the surprisingly delicate animations making these characters feel more real than a traditional visual novel. Opening the story with bass guitar riffs and a slow pan over a ‘they/them’ pronoun pin sets the tone for what type of characters Goodbye Volcano High will take as its central focus, and that instantly made me feel at home while I was hitting ‘Perfect!’ on the opening song’s notes.
Having a Band in High School
High school is obviously a place that most people remember in two ways: (1) an incredibly miserable, traumatizing, and prison-like experience; and (2) the nostalgic ‘good old days’ when we could thrive as our full selves, fulfilling expectations, experimenting with identities and relationships, and aspiring towards everything. My experience in high school was a definitive mix of both, and Goodbye Volcano High explores these tensions while still erring towards the second portrayal.
One such tension explored in Goodbye Volcano High that I was able to relate to quite well was the general disposition of the game’s protagonist Fang. Fang is the singer and lead songwriter for their band called Worm Drama, a group of three friends whose music wouldn’t feel out of place on the Battle of the Bands stage in Scott Pilgrim Versus the World. The game presents you with many of Worm Drama’s songs in the form of playable rhythm mini-games, and it becomes established rather early on that their band is quite good for a group of misfit high schoolers (unless you accidentally bomb a song like I did).
After much persistence, Worm Drama earns the approval of a local talent scout who enables them to play their own local Battle of the Bands, with the chance of future success finally right within their grasp. At the exact same time, however, the game’s main cast of characters are universally feeling the mounting pressure of life after high school and the impossibility of how to make a choice when the rest of your life has been otherwise laid out for you. Fang quite clearly wishes to continue pursuing music, but their friends and bandmates aren’t as immediately sold as Fang is. They may have gained adoring fans, but the game, like a stubborn pair of high-expectation parents, asks if that’s enough.
Moving on From Collaborative Art
Down to the smallest details, I see myself in Fang’s frustrations about their band. When I was growing up, I joined my first “real” band when I was fifteen years old. Fast forward a year or two and we had toured, opened for our favorite artists, recorded music in production studios, and had just won first place at our own high school’s Battle of the Bands event. As someone who deeply cared about music, I wanted nothing more than for this part of my life to become my career, and each of these victories felt like an answer to what I would do for a living. But then, one day, right before graduating in my senior year, the singer pulled me aside to tell me he was stepping back from the band – and this meant either going on without him or deciding to go our separate ways.
There’s something so frustrating about life events that feel arbitrarily ripped away from your control. We say goodbye to our life paths in high school or college just because the term has ended and the calendar page has flipped. We break apart bands that bring thousands of people joy because our creative inspirations evolve or because a friend suddenly discovers their love for entomology and we realize that we’d be selfish not to support them. In my specific case, our band had proven time and again that we were capable of success; right at the final trek up the mountain, my climbing partners turned around to go back down the slope. I feel like Goodbye Volcano High earnestly tries to grapple with those questions rather than resorting to comfortable cliches in answering them, and that’s why these moments resonated so well with my own experiences. Nearly fifteen years after watching my friends descend the mountain without me, I still wonder what the final ascent might have looked like.
A Strange Comparison
In explaining this adoration for Goodbye Volcano High to others, I have been strangely comparing this game in my head to one of my girlfriend’s childhood favorite films, The Cheetah Girls: something admittedly a little cheesy, focused on high school age kids, tapping into a sincere need to aspire for something maybe a little unrealistic or out of our grasp. Both are silly high school movies, more or less. Both are cheesy with cringe-worthy dialogue, more or less. But like both, I don’t care because they made me tear up. If a story is told well enough to make me cry, it’s a good story, as far as I am concerned. Cheetah Girls or Volcano High, just make sure you bring the tissues as we work through the emotional beats.
The focus on music in both pieces of media, and the big-headedness with which taking musical ambitions seriously causes each protagonist to alienate their bandmates, feels like a genuine parallel; both stories, Cheetah Girls and Volcano High, rely upon you caring about the relationships between the characters and bandmates in order to appreciate the music that the narrative presents you with. While I would have loved Goodbye Volcano High‘s music regardless of this narrative, dare I say, (Worm) drama, I loved it tenfold more because I was invested in whether the band had a future now that they had discovered success. Having missed such an opportunity myself, so to speak, I wanted to live it vicariously through these character facsimiles.
A Zenith of Queer Storytelling
The explicitly queer themes in Goodbye Volcano High are also handled in a manner that I wonder would have resonated with me if I had encountered a story like this in my own high school years. As I explored briefly in my coming out article years ago, video games taught me that representation is incredibly important for seeing possibilities for yourself and finding permission to be unapologetic when embracing who you are. Despite the years of belittling remarks hurled at me during my education, which I now understand as a blend of homophobia and transmisogyny when I was deep in the denial and questioning phases of my queerness, I never had a comforting example presented to me of a piece of media where being queer was okay.
In Fang’s case, genderqueerness reads as a strength, something cool, something to be proud of, yet another part of themself that they have carved out of pure determination and creativity. Fang struggles with aspects of this queer identity, most notably in being deadnamed and misgendered by their parents. Yet, this struggle always feeds back into some other kind of growth for the character, whether it’s repairing a sibling bond or stubbornly getting back to writing songs. My mind circles like a vulture over the possibilities for my past self: would the fact that this musician was genderqueer give me that vocabulary to see myself clearly for the first time?
Final Thoughts From the Beach
Finally, on a more superficial note, a striking image that captures my feelings about Goodbye Volcano High is the bonfire on the beach towards the end of the game. In this scene, the game’s main cast of characters unites by the water at night for a mixture of reconciliation, bonding, airing grievances, and ultimately coping with the inevitable fact of change that feels seismic when you’re experiencing it. I found this scene to be devastating in all the right ways.
I grew up about a five minute walk from the ocean, which meant that I was raised in a culture that revolved around going to the beach. Though we had to obtain a permit from the city to build a bonfire on the beach, one of the ways my friends and I said goodbye to one another was in a moment that feels eerily like what happens in Goodbye Volcano High. After obtaining the permit, our circle of friends met up on a full moon. That night, we exchanged surprising plans for our futures, like who had decided to move away for college and who was going to keep working their current jobs, like which couples were staying together and which ones were breaking up, like which memories we might still have yet to resolve and which ones we want to share for final clarity. The topics might be different than the game’s bonfire scene, but the feelings present on the beach during Goodbye Volcano High’s nighttime sequence tapped into some of the only truly nostalgic memories I have from an otherwise difficult period in my life, reigniting them.
When I started weeping over my Steam Deck during the final few chapters of Goodbye Volcano High, I realized that I had experienced something similar many times before. Yet, for all those personal reasons explored above, Goodbye Volcano High is a game that will stick with me for a long time, like the time each of my friends, one by one, walked away from that bonfire on the beach.
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