The Coda Melody: Goodbye Volcano High, Pre-Apocalypse Narratives and The Edge Of The End Of The World

The apocalypse is about loss.

Sounds obvious, but how often do we really associate those two things together? We think of ‘apocalypse’, and the lot of us are likely apt to picture desolate wastelands lousy with roaming Deathclaws or guzzoline-fueled war parties; undead hordes shambling through decaying cities or machine overlords nuking the old world.

In short, it’s so easy to picture the fire rather than what’s being lost to the flames.

But part of the reason we’re so endlessly fixated on the ruins of Pompeii is because the entire town being essentially baked in ash, turning everything from houses to people to family pets into a lasting sculpture reflecting their final moments upon this earth, makes it impossible to gaze beyond the fact that the end – of a life, a town, a civilization – isn’t just history. Pompeii will never fade from our collective memory because it forces us to reconcile the fact that these people had lives, hopes, dreams, lewd wall murals, right up to volcano day.

That’s the kind of stories we’re talking about today. Apocalypse in retrograde. The shadow before the storm.

This is actually bringing me back to one of the very first pieces I did for this website, eleven years ago (wait eleven years? no that’s not right. no stop), back when this site started out as a university project, hence the deep-dive analytical tone of that post (and the constant mention of American literary tropes specifically because it was a class about American lit) compared to the more laid-back, free-form energy of how I tend to write today. That article is big on apocalyptic aesthetics and how they’re interwoven in our culture to the point of near-ubiquity. I talk about Left 4 Dead a bunch in that post, but I’m reminded how in Left 4 Dead 2, one of the weapons you can pick up and bludgeon zombies with is a snazzy guitar that makes a weirdly satisfying untuned twang when you smash the undead with it.

But what we’re looking at today is the thought of who might have owned that guitar leading up to the end of the world.

Someone like Fang, the protagonist of KO_OP’s recent visual novel Goodbye Volcano High, who has big musical dreams, big ambitions, and is standing face to face with a universe that would rather put on a very different kind of rock show.

As I played, I felt like Goodbye Volcano High has a legitimate claim as a spiritual successor to Night In The Woods, though other than the music segments, it is closer to a straight-up visual novel rather than Night’s hybrid style of 2D free movement, visual novel narrative and minigames.

But certain moments bring you to that uncanny precipice of almost-too-real; as these characters go through lowkey stress, highkey stress, existential horror and personal turmoil, things come out that might start hitting a little too close to home. Speaking personally, I vibe in deep ways with Fang’s drive and passion for their burgeoning creative career, and with their increasingly less lowkey fear that they haven’t set up any other plans in case the band doesn’t work out, because the thing they’re actually passionate about is by no means a guaranteed income even if things do go relatively well, compared to some of their friends whose passions could more easily lead into bankable careers. Oh god I vibe so hard with this dinosaur.

Just like with the game I called this a spiritual successor to, there are moments where you’ll look at what just happened, awkwardly chuckle to yourself to deflect, and think, ‘Okay no please stop looking at me. Please stop seeing me.’ In other words this game ‘goes there’ and is not keen on waiting for your permission to suddenly dive into uncomfortable places.

I promise you’ll find something to vibe with in this cast of characters. Tiny things like trying to be nice and not hurt someone’s feelings when they’re enthusiastically talking at length about something you have no interest in; bigger things like being so afraid that you’ll push someone away that you hold on too tight and self-fulfill the prophecy; of constantly feeling pushed in a box, or never fitting in or never feeling accepted; of holding all the bad shit in until one day you just erupt like, well, a volcano.

Sometimes Fang’s emotions bleed right into the user interface in really cool ways: the devs essentially bottled that heavy feeling of really having to force out something that takes a lot of courage to say, the cursor fights against you and you need to push down the shoulder buttons (assuming you’re on controller) to get Fang to spill it. Sometimes the dialogue choices will go all staticy and glitchy because Fang is just so mind-frazzled that they can’t brain at all. The sheer Herculean willpower it takes to defy your teacher asking to confiscate your phone takes the form of a smarmy button-mashing QTE to determine just how much raw outlaw energy Fang is able to muster against their teacher’s scowling face and outstretched hand. But that’s the sort of thing that lets us into Fang’s head in ways that feel uncannily real. You feel those little things.

Just while I’m thinking about it, last time I poked at how games can groom the player in some pretty clever ways to act the way the game wants you to (in the case of Foretales, subtly nudging the player to think and make decisions in the vein of an archetypal time-loop protagonist). So I’d like to draw your attention to the fact that when you realize the social media feed in Goodbye Volcano High’s pause menu updates pretty much every scene, you will be continually pausing to check back to make sure you keep up to date with everything characters are posting. Or in other words, it gets you to method-act the part of a high schooler who can’t stop checking their phone without you even realizing it.

It would have been so easy for this game to fall into the trap of “how do you do, fellow queer teens into Music Bands and Social Websites” but this game seamlessly dodges that. Its writing feels authentic, not dissimilarly to how the Life Is Strange graphic novels feel very authentic. It helps that, as is my understanding, the development team themselves are extremely social-media-aware, I understand the team has a lot of great queer representation, and the devs probably remember their own high school days very well, plus having lived right through a global trauma event of our very own not too long ago, and are actually all dinosaurs themselves

On my second day playing the game, I messaged a friend who was also playing and said, “I swear if I fuck up Fang’s big audition I will savescum and retry before the game can save”, and on reflection I realized I was very much invested in what are honestly quite small-scale struggles in the face of what for these characters is impending apocalypse.

But that’s because the things that make the end of the world so meaningful are what we lose. The lives left unlived and everything that makes up those lives. Narratives like this can have so much power by tapping into that.

Because what makes pre-apocalypse narratives so powerful is that every action, no matter how mundane on its face, is tinged with impending potential loss. We should make a distinction here: in a spy thriller, when our hero is running around trying to prevent a dirty bomb from going off in NYC, that’s not pre-apocalypse, even though the hero’s actions are literally pre- a potential regional apocalypse. I wouldn’t call Avengers: Infinity War a pre-apocalypse narrative even though it ends with Thanos causing what by any standards is a universe-wide apocalypse, an abrupt and terrible change of being.

No, I think I’d class pre-apocalypse narratives as something where it’s not so easily digestible as heroes fighting a villain. It’s something more…fundamental, more cosmic than that, where our heroes are the main characters of their own story but bit players with little agency against the cosmic forces coming to bear. Where the character arcs are less about facing the threat as a hero, but almost having more in common with the stages of grief, from disbelief through to, in their own ways, acceptance.

By the way – gameplay tip about the songs if you’re as bad at intuiting things as me – It took me a few songs before said friend mentioned that you can just hold in the direction of the notes with the stick (or, presumably, directional keys if you’re on mouse and keyboard) to automatically hit the notes. I had been tapping the control stick to hit each note individually, which is insanely finicky and precise, and there is no earthly way I would have done well on the later songs if I was still doing that nonsense. I was making the songs so much harder on myself by playing them like a Sekiro charmless run where you have to perfect-deflect every single attack or take damage. I really don’t think the songs are meant to be difficult for you, the player; you’re meant to get into the groove and vibe, and when you do, all the stress melts away and you can just enjoy what’s happening on screen.

The Not-Dungeons & Dragons scenes are a pure delight. Reed’s voice actor completely kills it as the dramatic dungeon master, while the scenes themselves serve several purposes beyond the carefree joy of seeing these characters escaping into fantasy: showcasing Reed’s burgeoning creative writing side, providing a high fantasy metaphor for the main story, and on a meta level encouraging multiple playthroughs, as you can only experience half the Not-D&D scenes on any given playthrough.

And yet, all this is wrapped up in…I want to call it thematic predestination. We know in our gut where these character arcs and plot threads are leading. And it lends these events a unique resonance precisely because they’re given weight by what’s looming overhead in a very literal sense. Can we also call this an establishing characteristic of a pre-apocalyptic narrative? I think we can. Let’s do that.

The last third of the game has a certain elegiac tone to it. Near the start of the story, people dinos immediately start making memes about the asteroid, with genuine fear and concern trickling through the cracks between the disaffected shitposting, in what’s honestly a way-too-real-in-the-best-way take (including a seriously good depiction of doomscrolling) of how the modern world treats a looming crisis like this; but after a point, the increasingly less optimistic news reports stop being shown to the player, with visual storytelling taking over: the aurora borealis appearing all over the planet at all times, classes being cancelled due to executive order, with locker halls marked by doomer graffiti like GIVE UP – as it starts to really sink in for the society around our protagonists that they might have run out of tomorrows.

It’s a harrowing concept, thematically, existentially. At the same time, there’s no shortage of hope, filtered through the caustic but lowkey playful pugilism of social-media-brained teens.

Without spoiling anything too hard for you, I will say that this narrative differs from certain other pre-apocalyptic narratives in that maybe there is reason for hope. There’s a certain level of ambiguity as to what kind of damage the rock will do (though if we’re honest, it’s going to probably knock them back to the stone age at the least, while plunging them into a scenario akin to a disaster movie – tidal waves, raging fires, et cetera, as Naser dooms about in one early scene), and whether the dinos we’ve been following this whole time will survive.

And funnily enough, the ending left me with something other than sadfeels. Hope is an okay thing to have pre-apocalypse. Because apocalypse is just a really cool word for change, which is something that this game tries to impress upon you at several points. I saw someone say once that the fall of the Roman empire was sort of a local apocalypse. Losing someone you care deeply about is a sort of personal apocalypse.

I don’t think it’s any coincidence that our protagonists here are on the cusp of graduating high school, in some cases feeling like they’re being pushed out into the world without a safety net. That scene of Fang puzzling hard over college brochures, consumed by self-doubt and lowkey dread, feels like it’s making all this very clear. Change is the big rock over all our heads.

For the different strains of pre-apocalyptic narrative, I find myself thinking of something like Darren Aronofsky’s wonderful The Fountain, a film that drenches itself in layers of historical and visual metaphor to weave a story of pre-apocalypse on a personal level, of terminal illness and the fight to try and stop it. Or cult classic Donnie Darko, where large-scale existential apocalypse is ultimately prevented by personal apocalypse. And, hell, maybe James Cameron’s Titanic is another great example of a pre-apocalyptic narrative even by the very narrow standards I’ve set here: it’s got that sense of predestination, of slice-of-life events spiraling inevitably towards a cataclysmic conclusion, of the catastrophe having no real ‘villain’ at its heart and the source of mass death being something literally elemental, of the protagonists having no real agency against the unfolding nightmare.

I’m thinking a bit outside the box with my definition of this – it’s not quite as cut and dry as the absolutely stuffed toybox of tropes we instantly associate with post-apocalyptic stories. (I know the Steve Carrell movie Seeking A Friend For The End Of The World is about literally all of this and would have been perfect to talk about here, but I…haven’t seen it to talk about it? So I guess, go check it out if all this sounds good to you but dinosaurs aren’t your speed. In which case what are you even doing with life?)

Pre-apocalyptic narratives are fundamentally about raging against the dying of the light. Of not going gently or quietly – you know the lines. That just because the change is forcing itself upon you doesn’t mean that you cannot assert yourself. That there are things worth fighting for today even if today might be all you’ve got. They’re about humanity distilled to what you are – to quote Doctor Who – without hope, without witness, without reward. And from that darkness, they often reveal something surprisingly optimistic about us. Even The Simpsons, at its peak fundamentally a cutting satire of sitcom tropes that didn’t shy away from the cynical at times, brought that humanist optimism to bear in that one episode where they thought they’d end up flattened by an asteroid.

I really meant to make a super-broad article tying together all sorts of media and using the high school dinos as more of a jumping-off point, but I ended up talking a whole lot about the dinos instead. Part of it is that I went and made my personal definition of ‘pre-apocalypse narrative’ super tight and finicky, but part of it is that this game got in my head. It’s there now. Much like the aforementioned Night In The Woods, when it ended I found that I wanted more. Not in the sense that I was dissatisfied – far from it – I simply wished I had more time with these characters and their stories.

Because the heavy changes will come to all of us, they will crash down upon us whether we’re prepared or not, but we will never stop having the stories we tell. In that sense, we never go extinct.

.

.

.

.

(You know, when GVH’s dino society claws its way into the smoke-choked post-apocalyptic sunlight, I’m feeling Fang as the one who’s playing the flaming guitar at the head of the war party.)

You can play Goodbye Volcano High on Steam or on Playstation. No physical version yet, but hopefully Limited Run or Fangamer or someone will do their thing in the future.