Game: Asfalia: The Cranky Volcano
Genre: Adventure, Point & Click
System: Nintendo Switch (Also on Steam (Windows and macOS), iOS and Android)
Developer | Publisher: Funtomata
Age Rating: US Everyone | EU 7+
Price: US $9.99 | UK £8.99 | EU € 9,99
Release Date: October 30th, 2025
Review code used, with many thanks to Funtomata.
Asfalia: The Cranky Volcano was released on Steam nearly three years ago, albeit under the name Asfalia: Anger. We reviewed the sequel, Asfalia: Panic at the Mansion (originally Asfalia: Fear) on Steam earlier this year and Mina gave it our golden Two Thumbs Up. Now both games are coming to Nintendo Switch at the end of October.
Will the game erupt with energy and charm, or will I end up as cranky as the volcano?
The Excitement of Home Time
Asfalia: The Cranky Volcano starts with a cut scene showing Charlie leaving school and cycling home. This introduction gives chance to show the acknowledgements, the delightful graphics and becomes the tutorial. Throughout the game, you play as Charlie, so there is no character customisation.
The brief tutorial shows how to move, search and interact with objects. You’ll need to practise moving and searching in order to clear the instruction. Clicking on searchable items could be rewarded with a sticker for Charlie’s notebook, and some items can be collected and added to the satchel to be used later.
Once the front yard has been explored, Charlie can enter the house to continue looking for Baya, the dog. Eventually, Charlie finds Baya, and wants to play, but Baya doesn’t want to join in. Charlie gets very frustrated and starts shouting. In this angry state, Charlie gets sucked into an imaginary world.
Asfalia and The Cranky Volcano
Asfalia is a weird and wonderful world, inspired by the likes of Alice in Wonderland and Inside Out. Items which appear in Charlie’s house become characters to interact with and help.
The game is aimed at a younger audience, and this is evident by the short chapters and prescriptive nature of fulfilling the quests. However, there are aspects which seem counter-intuitive, for example, certain items need to be interacted with several times in order to release the sticker.
Asfalia and The Cranky Volcano is very short, so I am deliberately not going to say any more about the plot or handful of puzzles. I completed it in about an hour and collected 75% of the stickers in that playthrough.
Once you’ve completed the game, you have the option of selecting a chapter to replay. If you select the prologue, you can skip the initial cutscene, but for the rest, it’s like starting again, listening to all the conversations with no option to skip.
Gameplay
Although the controls are very straightforward, I did find using the cursor frustrating. The cursor will snap to nearby interactive items, but at times it felt it moved in a random direction, and I was never sure if I had moved to all the searchable locations. The cursor also vanished after an animation, and it took a while to get it back on screen. Although I didn’t experience any software issues on the Nintendo Switch, there was a noticeable flicker on the Nintendo Switch 2. The text was large enough to read on the handheld screen, and it was refreshing to have touchscreen functionality.
The highlight of Asfalia: The Cranky Volcano is the voice acting, each of the characters have their own voic,e and it helps to bring them to life. There are various options to remove the dialogue boxes, or pause between paragraphs.
At various points during the game, the volcano will rumble and as well as a sound, the game picture shudders to emphasis the seismic activity.
The game autosaves as you enter a new area, but there is only one save slot.
Conclusion
The voice acting and artwork in Asfalia: The Cranky Volcano are wonderful, and although short, there are some clever touches. Unfortunately, I found the cursor movement a bit too distracting to fully immerse myself in the whimsical world.
Final Verdict: I Like it 
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