Goodbye Volcano High (2023)

This game feels like it needs some more prominent music outside of the rhythm game sections. You can tell they put effort into those but whenever I'm listening to dialogue-- most of the game-- I can't help but notice how loud the near silence behind the words is. It would help the atmosphere tremendously I think to have something contextually appropriate playing in the background.

This game's concept is so good--a coming of age story involving dinosaurs in high school about to face extinction--but in execution it's just okay. Firstly, I don't want people to go in with the wrong expectations and be disappointed so: if you don't like visual novels you won't like this. It has a few rhythm sections but not many and, frankly, they aren't very good. Maybe it's due to the genre of songs (it's hard to actually feel a rhythm for them) or just the kind of odd mechanics of it. But the majority of this game is a visual novel. Unlike most other VNs though, this doesn't have multiple endings (narratively I don't think it would have made sense to) but you can get different conversations with different characters based on your choices. Story wise, it's not terrible but falls a little flat in most places. There's a couple really beautiful and touching scenes, particularly the campfire scene. But after that scene the game kinda just drags on until the ending. A lot of the more interesting plot points are barely explored, which is disappointing, particularly those involving Naomi's parents. Like that point near the end could have been really interesting but it doesn't do more than a passing mention before moving on. This leads to the next disappointment which is the nonbinary rep. I was excited when I heard the main character was nonbinary, since I've never gotten to play a game with someone like me as a playable character before. Again, it's not terrible, but it is surface level. Fang's parents' struggle to accept them is brought up, but since their parents are barely in it, it doesn't have an opportunity to delve into it. This leads to the conclusion of that not being nearly as impactful as it was probably intended to be. I'm okay with both kinds of representation, those that have discussions and those that just let the character be. But when the discussion is shallow it doesn't really feel like it was intended /for/ nonbinary people, but rather as an intro for others, like Nonbinary 101. The animation is decent and the voice acting is pretty good, but the best part of this game is definitely the soundtrack. The music is great, but unfortunately it's not a genre I'm personally a big fan of. If you like soft indie music though (I think that's what genre this is?), you should give the soundtrack a shot if nothing else. This game had so much potential to be great, and while I'm still happy it exists, I can't help but feel like it was a bit of a letdown.

Ugh, because Grouvee still had the previous release date of 15 June, it is showing up in the new releases on the main page. I've corrected the date, but let me just tell you I was incredibly stoked I was when I thought I was going to get to play this today, and then deeply disappointed I was when I realized I still have to wait two months :-(