In a press release, the devs say: “In addition to Global Events™️, 2020 saw us rebooting the narrative of our game. Those two factors have delayed our release timeline. So we are making what we’re sure is by now an expected announcement: Goodbye Volcano High will be a 2022 title, not a 2021 one.” “It’s been a really hard year for many reasons, and the mental and physical health of the team has to come first. We don’t want to crunch, and we don’t want to put ourselves in stressful situations to finish the game by 2021 when we can take a little more time,” they add. This isn’t the first game that the global pandemic has caused delays for, and I’m sure it won’t be the last. I certainly don’t begrudge anyone for needing a little more time, even if I was excited to see big angsty teen lizards. The reason for Goodbye Volcano High’s delay is because the team are changing the game’s “entire narrative direction”. In an interview on their website, they explain that they brought in a new narrative team in June 2020 (right around the time the game was revealed at E3) and started on the daunting task of rebooting the whole story. “I think when you join a game already in motion, the first couple weeks are a bit like putting together a puzzle. You have a lot of pieces left over from the original narrative, and you sort of have to pick through them,” said narrative designer Kim Belair. “You have all of these assets already developed, bits of animation already done, gameplay sequences mapped… so you really are doing the work of making connections and building narrative between them, rather than coming in and making something from the ground up.” “We also had to reverse engineer certain story decisions that we would have treated differently if we were starting from scratch. A bit like an elaborate game of exquisite corpse,” added writer Camerin Wild. It sounds like they have their work cut out for them, especially given the game has a branching narrative. For now, we’ll have to wait until 2022 to see how this reboot goes. When it does come out, it’ll be on Steam, PS4 and PS5.
