In Volcanique, you play as a clan of fervid critters who follow their ancient spirit’s dreams, desperately trying to outmanoeuvre the other critters that crawl across the limited lands in an attempt to be the first to resurrect your creator-spirit. Trigger volcanoes to gain passive powers, sacrifice critters to summon new islands and pay resource tributes to unlock secret points and powers.

Hundreds of millions of years ago, when the Australian continent pulsed with molten fire, the Earth gave birth to ancient spirits.

They sculpted life not with gentle hands, but with eruptions that split mountains into rivers of lava. Their creations were small, flame-tempered critters that thrived around the inferno. But when the seas rose to drown the land, the spirits spent their last embers shielding their favoured critters up onto tiny islands, before sinking into the asthenosphere to dream.

Now, their slumber is restless.

Their rumbling dreams seep into the land through cracks in the crust, twisting into songlines that hum in the bones of the critters above. These loyal critters collect shimmering minerals forged from the spirits’ dreams coursing through the earth, using them to construct new biomes atop the drowned island ruins of the old world. Each devoted critter clan thrives on the ego of its creator-spirit, its songline a warped hymn:

The critters, drunk on divine dreams, fight with their terraforming claws to honour their spirits, trying to squash any songline of other spirits that grow too loud. The land expands as a patchwork of half-truths, colliding myths, and buried fire that threatens to wake all the slumbering spirits… ending the world a second time.

Created with extensive input from my lore abiding citizen, the littlest guy I know, Huon Croucher