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Goodbye Volcano High is a narrative adventure game which follows a dinosaur in high school, who is grappling with the transience of teenage freedom and worries for the future, and it’s on its way to PlayStation 4, PlayStation 4, and PC.
The game stood out in the showcase of PlayStation 5 titles for its interesting art style and quieter subject matter. Developed by KO_OP, Fang is an 18-year-old dinosaur who is “more concerned about their band going viral than they are about what happens after graduation.” We’ve all been there. Featuring a fully voice-acted cast featuring Lachlan Watson (from The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina) and a “queer narrative created by a diverse team with multiple storylines and unique endings”, the game seeks to unpick the introspective anxiety of high-school graduates transitioning from one stage of their life and into the great wide somewhere.
What’s particularly cheering about Goodbye Volcano High is that its protagonist is non-binary, and KO_OP has taken care to inform its story with diverse and grounded experience. “Our company is a co-op in which all the voices matter,” said studio director Saleem Dabbous. “The team working on Goodbye Volcano High is about ten people, all coming from diverse backgrounds. Making a queer game about a non-binary main character is hugely important to us.”
Dabbous also stated how a partnership with PlayStation has helped tremendously with the studio’s vision. “Partnering with PlayStation has given us the opportunity to build something of incredible production value. Everything you see in this first trailer was taken directly from the game and is playable,” he said. The game also will use the DualSense’s haptic feedback to create “a new kind of story-telling experience”, but what exactly this entails is yet to be seen.
What we do know is that Goodbye Volcano High is “a cinematic narrative adventure about the end of an era… and the beginning of a love story”, and that it will launch for PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, and PC in 2021. Watch the trailer below.
