By the time Campo Santo were reaching the end of Firewatch’s development, Chris Remo was itching to start over. “I remember feeling, ‘God, if we made this exact same game again now, we could take these ideas so much further’.”
After Firewatch’s release, Remo began giving talks about what Campo Santo were trying to do: making a game that focused not on interactivity, but reactivity. “I was hoping this model would catch on and be pushed forward and done in a more ambitious way than we did,” Remo says. “There was a part of me that was hoping that Firewatch would point the way towards its own subgenre.”
But the ideas at the heart of Firewatch didn’t spark imitators. Ten years on from Firewatch’s release, Remo shares why he thinks reactive narrative games didn’t spread.
While you can look at Firewatch and simply label it as a walking simulator – a term the team don’t use pejoratively – there are influences and sensibilities stretching under its surface that are unique.
Over Firewatch’s development, the team pushed walking simulators into new ground. By setting their narrative exploration game in the present tense and drawing influences from embodied first-person games like Mirror’s Edge and Far Cry 2, and pairing them with a reactive world inspired by immersive sims like Deus Ex and Bioshock, Campo Santo built an absorbing narrative game that reacted and reshaped itself to your choices. The world wasn’t one of puzzles and actions, but the choices you made in dialogue, the items you chose to collect in its world, even the views of the landscape you saw (or didn’t see) were reflected back to you in the conversations your character, Henry, would have with his colleague, Delilah.
“You’re not interacting with a system the way that you’d interact with a deep combat model,” Remo explains. “You’re simply doing things as a human being and then the world reacts to that”. He’s quick to add that Firewatch isn’t the “epitome” of these ideas, “but that’s what we were trying to grasp towards.”
“[In The Valley Of Gods was] much more ambitious in terms of scope and scale.”
Campo Santo did start work on developing this subgenre further themselves. After completing Firewatch in 2016, they moved onto a project that Remo says “was much more puzzly”, but drew on the same ideas of reactive narrative and put them in “a more gameplay-driven context”. While that project was shelved, the team moved onto In The Valley Of Gods, which was “more of a direct followup to Firewatch,” Remo says. “Again, much more mechanically ambitious and much more ambitious in terms of scope and scale but really the intention was to follow up those gameplay and narrative ideas.”
However, as you may well know, after Valve acquired Campo Santo in 2018, the team began working on other Valve projects such as Half-Life: Alyx, Dota Underlords, and Artifact. Eventually, In The Valley Of Gods was put on indefinite hold in 2019. Remo says it’s “probably unlikely to be released at this point.”
In the ten years since, first-person narrative games certainly haven’t disappeared, but they still often tell fixed stories. Remo says one reason what Campo Santo were trying with reactivity wasn’t picked up elsewhere is because “It’s more difficult than people think. Not from a mind-boggling technical perspective, but from a game design and story design perspective.”
“It’s one thing to stick some of this stuff into a first-person shooter when it’s not loadbearing,” Remo continues, “but when it is the entire game [and] you can’t stick in some firefights and puzzles […] it’s actually very difficult to fill hours of a player’s time.”
And, for a game underpinned by its narrative, many storytelling tools available to creators are prohibitively expensive, especially when compared to other mediums. “What’s the easiest thing to create in a film? Two people speaking to each other,” Remo says. “You can cut in a few close-ups and you get infinite expressivity of a good actor basically for free. Once you’ve paid the actor, all that stuff they’re doing is incredible and an animator doesn’t need to spend thousands of hours creating it. That’s kind of the hardest thing to convincingly do in video games. Even now. We’re getting to a point where that kind of thing is getting reasonably convincing in really big, lavish games. But it is not the thing video games naturally do.”
For games, the equivalent of filming two faces talking to each other, Remo says, is making a Space Invaders game or a simple platformer in Unity. “You can get one of those up and going in 10 minutes.” The tools are free, there are sample projects to work with, and thousands of hours of training and tutorials available to learn from.
“It makes sense to me that those are the games that have taken over.”
Remo says that games like Firewatch “are fighting against the medium”, Campo Santo and the walking simulator developers they followed were actively tearing out the interactive elements that are most natural to the medium. “If you’re below the age of 18 you’ve grown up in a world in which all of the most important and played and talked about games – certainly among your peer group, but even beyond your peer group – are kind of the exact opposite of [Firewatch],” Remo says. “They’re things like Minecraft and Roblox and Fortnite. They’re more native to interactive software. It makes sense to me that those are the games that have taken over.”
So, yes, Firewatch sold well and the team spread the word of what they had tried to do and how they had learned to do it, but it’s not surprising to Remo that there aren’t more games that followed in Campo Santo’s footsteps. “You’re swimming against the tide making games like this and you’re also taking a big gamble on whether there’s going to be an audience for it. It’s tough. I’m not begrudging it, but I think it is a reality.”