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Currently a poorly made port of an otherwise immersive virtual daughter sim | Review - Volcano Girl
493 View2024-02-06
✨Overview
I recently tried out a game called Volcano Girl, a virtual father/daughter game with management and life-sim elements. This app seems like a trial version of an upcoming mobile port of the popular game Volcano Princess that was released last year on PC. In Volcano Girl, players take on the role of a single parent tasked with raising their daughter after the passing of the late wife.
⭐️Trial (Demo) Score: 5/10
I recently tried out a game called Volcano Girl, a virtual father/daughter game with management and life-sim elements. This app seems like a trial version of an upcoming mobile port of the popular game Volcano Princess that was released last year on PC. In Volcano Girl, players take on the role of a single parent tasked with raising their daughter after the passing of the late wife.
⭐️Trial (Demo) Score: 5/10
📖Story and Premise
Set in the Volcano Kingdom, the game's narrative revolves around a single parent guiding their daughter through life, studies, and relationships; after the passing of the father’s late wife five years ago. The player — as the father — explores new hobbies with their daughter, engages in different jobs, and influences the daughter's growth over time. The story emphasizes the importance of familial bonds and the consequences of choices on the daughter's future. The intro and its melodramatic soundtrack immediately immerses you in the story and effortlessly places you in the shoes of the father.
🎨Visuals and Art
The art style of Volcano Girl is characterized by its 2D cartoon anime aesthetics, vibrant colors, and a paper doll-like aesthetic. There is a brownish color palette that adds warmth and nostalgia to the medieval setting, resulting a visually enchanting and nostalgic atmosphere. In some ways the visuals look like early 2000s flash games, especially sim-life flash games in that era. The GUI is a bit rough around the edges in some parts but nothing really bad.
🎮Gameplay
Why get a virtual pet when you can have a virtual daughter? Well, Volcano Girl is a point-and-click management game centered around parenting a daughter. Similar to its art style, the gameplay evokes the feel of early 2000s flash games, both in aesthetics and handheld UI/Menus, and also reminiscent of the Princess Maker series.
As the father, you are presented with many different activities you can do with your daughter that can shape how she will grow up. Talking with her, eating with her, cooking, visiting the village, farming, and even activities inside your home. The village can be explored and many different areas can be visited, and more will unlock as time passes by. Time in the game is divided into turns equivalent into months. Players must allocate their time wisely between different activities to improve their daughters stats and build relationships.
The game involves managing various stats and attributes of your daughter. These can include attributes like intelligence, charm, imagination, and strength. Improving these stats is crucial for success in different aspects of the game. Every end of the month you can choose what courses to enroll your daughter in and that will increase their progress in that course until eventually finishing it learning everything from controlling emotion, imagination, or making friends. At the end of the day the game becomes a choice between how you want to spend your time with your daughter to see how she would turn out, the whole gameplay loop is simple but very immersive.
Another core of the gameplay revolves around building relationships with in-game characters. Players, and their daughter can interact with different characters, engage in conversations, storytelling, contests, and more. As the months go by, more locations and events will be unlocked, while the daughter will age and mature as time passes in both stats and looks.
📊Technical Performance
Volcano Girl still has mouse control prompts and lacks full touch control implementation. Some parts, such as mini-games, skill trees, and cutscenes, are either broken or difficult to control. While the game runs flawlessly due to its light 2D nature, it is very unstable and consistently crashes or soft-locks during my playthrough.
By 'softlock,' I mean touches become unresponsive or cutscenes stop without reason. I have no choice but to skip, and eventually in my playthrough of the trial, I reached a game-breaking moment that didn’t allow me to continue playing at a certain point in the game. I'm not quite sure if this is where the trial ends, but that much is not clear. There are also minor visual bugs at the sides of the screen, not to mention it only runs at a fixed 16:9 resolution on our wider phones. I may have to revisit this title in the future if ever all these issues gets resolved.
⚖️Conclusion
In its trial version, Volcano Girl presents a blend of life simulation and a heartfelt narrative that is a perfect fit for mobile devices. However, technical issues of this port currently hamper this otherwise excellent experience that it had on PC. As a demo, it successfully manages to get your attention to want to play the full game to the point that you’d probably buy the already existing PC version now and skip the wait. Otherwise, I hope these issues will be fixed when the game is officially released for mobile devices.
Set in the Volcano Kingdom, the game's narrative revolves around a single parent guiding their daughter through life, studies, and relationships; after the passing of the father’s late wife five years ago. The player — as the father — explores new hobbies with their daughter, engages in different jobs, and influences the daughter's growth over time. The story emphasizes the importance of familial bonds and the consequences of choices on the daughter's future. The intro and its melodramatic soundtrack immediately immerses you in the story and effortlessly places you in the shoes of the father.
🎨Visuals and Art
The art style of Volcano Girl is characterized by its 2D cartoon anime aesthetics, vibrant colors, and a paper doll-like aesthetic. There is a brownish color palette that adds warmth and nostalgia to the medieval setting, resulting a visually enchanting and nostalgic atmosphere. In some ways the visuals look like early 2000s flash games, especially sim-life flash games in that era. The GUI is a bit rough around the edges in some parts but nothing really bad.
🎮Gameplay
Why get a virtual pet when you can have a virtual daughter? Well, Volcano Girl is a point-and-click management game centered around parenting a daughter. Similar to its art style, the gameplay evokes the feel of early 2000s flash games, both in aesthetics and handheld UI/Menus, and also reminiscent of the Princess Maker series.
As the father, you are presented with many different activities you can do with your daughter that can shape how she will grow up. Talking with her, eating with her, cooking, visiting the village, farming, and even activities inside your home. The village can be explored and many different areas can be visited, and more will unlock as time passes by. Time in the game is divided into turns equivalent into months. Players must allocate their time wisely between different activities to improve their daughters stats and build relationships.
The game involves managing various stats and attributes of your daughter. These can include attributes like intelligence, charm, imagination, and strength. Improving these stats is crucial for success in different aspects of the game. Every end of the month you can choose what courses to enroll your daughter in and that will increase their progress in that course until eventually finishing it learning everything from controlling emotion, imagination, or making friends. At the end of the day the game becomes a choice between how you want to spend your time with your daughter to see how she would turn out, the whole gameplay loop is simple but very immersive.
Another core of the gameplay revolves around building relationships with in-game characters. Players, and their daughter can interact with different characters, engage in conversations, storytelling, contests, and more. As the months go by, more locations and events will be unlocked, while the daughter will age and mature as time passes in both stats and looks.
📊Technical Performance
Volcano Girl still has mouse control prompts and lacks full touch control implementation. Some parts, such as mini-games, skill trees, and cutscenes, are either broken or difficult to control. While the game runs flawlessly due to its light 2D nature, it is very unstable and consistently crashes or soft-locks during my playthrough.
By 'softlock,' I mean touches become unresponsive or cutscenes stop without reason. I have no choice but to skip, and eventually in my playthrough of the trial, I reached a game-breaking moment that didn’t allow me to continue playing at a certain point in the game. I'm not quite sure if this is where the trial ends, but that much is not clear. There are also minor visual bugs at the sides of the screen, not to mention it only runs at a fixed 16:9 resolution on our wider phones. I may have to revisit this title in the future if ever all these issues gets resolved.
⚖️Conclusion
In its trial version, Volcano Girl presents a blend of life simulation and a heartfelt narrative that is a perfect fit for mobile devices. However, technical issues of this port currently hamper this otherwise excellent experience that it had on PC. As a demo, it successfully manages to get your attention to want to play the full game to the point that you’d probably buy the already existing PC version now and skip the wait. Otherwise, I hope these issues will be fixed when the game is officially released for mobile devices.
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