Lower budget, lower stakes, and all the better for it.
She put the fucking dog down. Tied it to a tree, aimed the gun, dug a grave.
Sorry, spoilers.
Park ranger Eve killed the coyote pup she’d adopted outside her cabin in Yosemite (despite her better judgment) because it was cute and hadn’t hurt anyone the way so many two-legged abominations keep vandalizing the parks. But now the pup had done exactly what was in its nature(!) and bit a kid and Eve’s just in her 20s with a disfigured child on her conscience on top of the years of misanthropy, and to hell with it, she should just go drink herself to death in the middle of the desert. And because this is a yuri visual novel, that desert is corporealized in the form of a delusional, gun-slinging anime girl with a dead eye and an attitude.
This, somehow, is the game that feels most like it understands my life. Makes sense of it, even.
National Park Girls is a visual novel from Highway Blossoms developer Studio Coattails. Originally released episodically from 2019 through 2023, spanning both pandemic lockdowns and government shutdowns where the parks themselves were closed, the five part VN is now being rereleased as a single collection, the Love Our Parks Edition. It’s out on Steam today. With it comes new art, UI improvements, and my own pitch that games can still make you feel something without rendering a character down to their pores.
At its start, Eve is an already jaded 20-something ranger in Yosemite. Never fond of the tourists—at best an inconvenience and more often a nuisance to the wellbeing of the park and herself—Eve’s hostility towards the people around her escalates until she snaps on a particularly egregious vandal, and after being reassigned to the most isolated post her doting supervisor could find, an old cabin near a campground, Eve is resigned to her self-loathing.
Then she discovers she is not alone.
Following a humorously frightening introduction, she meets the three girls already living in this cabin. Yosemite, the oldest, is an elfish woman with wit and pretension to rival Eve’s. The ranger less than affectionately likens her to an overgrown tree, with rivers for frosted tips she can ring the water out of. It comes in handy. Yellowstone is a teenager with an impression-fueled sense of humor and a literal caldera on her head, which smokes and billows with her many feelings. The youngest, Zion, is a cherub with honesty and perspective that more than makes up for her lack of lived wisdom. She’s the only sane one of the bunch.
Oh and there’s the coyote they adopted. Shenanigans ensue.
Eve finds herself living in a cabin in Yosemite with a lady who claims to be Yosemite and two girls with anatomical, topographical oddities. They’re more than just mascots: They influence the weather in each park with just their moods, teleport within their parks, and they are apparently much longer-lived than they appear. Throughout the VN, Yosemite and Eve try to figure out what these park girls really are with clues from new age books and park records, all the while learning who they each are as people together.
It’s a funny and saccharine story of found family with a charming slow burn simmering away in the background as they manage to grow better together. But growth isn’t linear.
Eve’s animosity does not make her very likable at first, but her mundane workplace frustrations and struggles at young adult actualization are sympathetic. For me, she was too relatable. As I’ve felt throughout my mid 20s, she’s lost meaning in her work and is sick of people after witnessing so much apathy to the world around her. A lot of my young life was caring about things more than people and hurting them and me and never really reconciling that beyond isolating myself. Music, writing, research, criticism; these became the world. Eve’s withdrawal manifests in showing more patience to a coyote pup she should know better than to domesticate than she does to most humans.
Just as Eve and the park girls settle into a bucolic routine, National Park Girls takes a dramatic turn to a dark place—and to Death Valley National Park. It’s rare to see a game commit to such a radical tonal shift, partly due to the development cost of not just models and animations but whole mechanics. National Park Girls is literally free to lean into Eve’s humorous angst and alcoholic, ideatory nihilism with as much zest as its most whimsical and tender moments. And it is in Death Valley where Eve’s road ends. She either dies alongside the park’s cocksure buckaroo or stops running.
National Park Girls isn’t profound by any means, but it was more relatable than any AAA grand fantasy or edgy romp I played last year. I just don’t make many last stands against hordes of monsters with my very pretty friends I feel entirely platonic about, ya know? I think that’s something I appreciate about visual novels: They’re not pretending to be something with a hyperbolic suffix attached, not trying to be the most anything. Perhaps that’s because the people making them are making them on their own terms, not as a corporate investment.
National Park Girls is not the most elaborate production even among VNs, but the art direction works and, most importantly, it is fully voice acted with great direction. Natalie Van Sistine’s performance as Eve carries the misery and hurt of her character further than the writing alone could. It’s also scored with a catchy original bluegrass soundtrack by Sarah Mancuso, a composer with an exceptional discography of VN and Doom WAD OSTs you didn’t know you needed.
People who will not have read this far might think: this is romance, fluff, genre fic, nothing serious! And no, it’s not literature, but neither are most games treated with such reverence. It’s Treasure Island, not Moby Dick, as is everything Square Enix, Atlus, or CDPR have ever published—no matter how pretty or interactive they are. The complaints towards visual novels and such mundane fiction feels more about subject matter and audience than anything defensible of genre or form. One of these fantasies just isn’t about warriors and kings.
Like her small cabin in the woods with only one bed, there is room for stories about romance and girls and that feeling everyone that believes in something in their 20s has to get over. And like Eve, it’s content to be where it belongs.
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