In May 2014, the small team at Campo Santo were still in the early days of making Firewatch, a first-person narrative exploration game – you can call it a walking simulator, they do, and with no disparagement. The developers assembled at their San Francisco offices, some came from nearby, others from as far away as Vancouver, Canada and Winchester in the UK. They loaded up cars with beer, board games, and tents, and drove the several hours to Yosemite National Park, where, as one of Campo Santo’s founders Nels Anderson puts it, “We went camping in the goddamn woods.”
While Firewatch was always due to be set more than 500 miles away in Shoshone National Forest in Wyoming, the team wanted to get deep into a forest and find the feeling of being surrounded and overwhelmed by nature. “All of us would say we were highly informed by that trip,” Chris Remo says. He remembers thinking “In a year and a half, this is the thing we will have hopefully captured some little part of.”
Out in the forest the eleven game developers visited a decommissioned lookout tower. Looking like a cabin on stilts, standing tall above the tops of the trees, the structure was where park staff would spend the summer months, scanning the horizon for the telltale sign of a smoke plume. Anderson recalls taking in the physical space of this small, lonely cabin on stilts. “You can see really far in every single possible direction.”
From Firewatch’s beginning, the lookout tower in the Shoshone National Forest was there. “The location was the strongest thing,” Remo says. “That came from Sean [Vanaman] growing up in Wyoming and wanting to tell a story in this environment. And there would be a mystery there.” Anderson agrees that there was only a rough sketch of an idea in the beginning. There would be a lookout tower, a person on a radio who you couldn’t be sure you could trust – “a la Bioshock,” he says – but that was enough to start with.
After the trip, Anderson tracked down a former lookout to hear what it was like to spend all that time lost in nature. “Firewatch is a game that is slightly heightened in a thriller way,” Anderson says. “But ultimately, it’s about real people in a real place doing a real job.” He wanted to know what it was like to spend month after month in isolation. Anderson remembers ringing Canada’s Ministry of Forests, which also operates a fire lookout service – “I know this is a very weird question, but I’m making a video game. No, wait, don’t hang up about being a fire lookout. No, please, seriously, don’t hang up.” – and being passed to smaller and smaller offices in remoter and remoter places until he was given the number of a woman who had spent many successive years working in a lookout tower.
Grace told Anderson about the beauty of looking out over the woods, but also the boredom. She would spend her days doing jigsaw puzzles and then trade them for new ones with the other lookouts. She also told him of the unsettling nights, where she could hear the rats and the mice walking along the lookout railings. While the nighttime rodents didn’t make it into the eventual game, the conversation helped Anderson and the team tell a more grounded story. A human story.
“It was a human scale story, and there aren’t a huge number of them in video games.”
Coming in the wake of games like Dear Esther and Gone Home, Firewatch places you in the shoes of Henry, a man who has taken a job as a fire lookout in Wyoming’s Shoshone National Forest. In the course of an opening montage that blends choose your own adventure interactive fiction segments and vignettes of Henry’s journey – throwing his backpack into the back of a truck, locking his car at the edge of the Shoshone forest, swinging his legs over a log on the trail up to his post – we learn that Henry is running away from his life outside the forest. His wife, Julia has developed early onset dementia and Henry isn’t coping. When her family takes her in to give her better care Henry doesn’t follow.
On arriving at his lookout, Henry is greeted over the radio by Delilah, a fellow lookout working in the neighbouring quadrant. Over Firewatch’s few hours, you see their relationship grow as tjey investigate the mystery of a pair of missing teens, a former fire lookout and his son, and a strange research project behind a chainlink fence.
“It was a human scale story, and there aren’t a huge number of them in video games,” Remo says, sharing what attracted him to the project. “Even among the games that are set in our world – not a supernatural world or alternative reality – and are about adults with adult problems, even then many of those are based around violence.” He adds that there’s “nothing wrong with that” but Firewatch was a rare chance to tell a story “set in our world in a way that speaks to things human beings have to deal with on a regular basis.”
Remo says the team were looking at how they could evolve the genre of walking simulators – which he stresses he doesn’t mean negatively, pointing out that he worked on Gone Home. “It wasn’t an attempt to fix or correct,” Anderson echoes. “The quip is true, you’re standing on the shoulders of giants.”
“Intentionally, we didn’t have a game full of combat,” Remo says. “We didn’t even really have puzzles. I love the classic adventure games, don’t get me wrong, but, for this particular game, we wanted to move away from occasionally contrived combine A with B.” But that restraint carried a risk. “Our brains are good at doing a lot of stuff,” Anderson explains, “and ‘walk through this hallway’ is not consuming enough of your consciousness and attention for it to not just feel a little bit dull.”
So if there wasn’t going to be combat and there weren’t going to be puzzles, what was going to stop the player from just sprinting through the world and keep them engaged? The answer was to add a touch of the first-person shooter back into the walking simulator.
As you walk through Firewatch’s woods and plains, your screen is almost empty of a HUD, except, that is, for the circular crosshair at the centre of your screen. Look around the environment and if your crosshair lands on an object of interest, a radio symbol pops up and gives you the option to call Delilah about it. “Early on, we noticed that people were paying way more attention to what’s around them,” Anderson says. He can’t recall whether it was instinct or something the team consciously identified, but the radio was their way of bringing back both the action of a shooter and the friction that holds people in place. “Instead of shooting bullets, you shoot words out of your mouth to talk about a thing. If that doesn’t exist people naturally just blitz through the area to get to the next thing.”
While the team knew talking to another character would be compelling, after seeing its effect on players in their early tests, and after casting Cissy Jones, Anderson says they added as many lines as they could: “She is so goddamn talented that it was like, ‘Oh, we just want as much Cissy as possible.'”
Cissy and Henry don’t just comment on the world, though, they change it as you play. Choices you make in dialogue are referred to in later conversations. Notes, photos, and posters you find in stash boxes around the park later appear pinned to the walls of your cabin. If you take a left turn instead of a right, you might come across a turtle that later lives in a box of straw beside your bed. Take the right turn and you’ll never know the joy of an adopted turtle. In a thousand little ways you make choices in your playthrough and the world reflects those choices back to you.
“It’s using the micro to paint a larger tone.”
Firewatch doesn’t change like The Witcher 2, with whole chapters and sections of the world closing off based on the choices you make in quests; however you play, the action follows the same path, but the person walking the path takes on different shades. Depending on the dialogue options you choose, how open you choose to be about the events that led you into the forest, you might view Henry as fragile and quick to take offense, or he may be open and vulnerable, or, he could seem avoidant by looking for fun distraction at every opportunity, never touching on his wife’s condition.
“It’s using the micro to paint a larger tone,” Remo explains. “You’re simply doing things as a human being and then the world in the game reacts to that, which is more how we operate in the world. Most of us don’t have massive amounts of agency in our world and life to the point that we can affect the grand sweep of events. Most of us aren’t going around and killing other people or creatures or whatever, we just do the things we do and then sometimes those things have effects that we could have predicted – and sometimes absolutely could not have predicted. I’m not saying this game is the epitome of that, but that was definitely something we were actively trying to do.”
Anderson says the inspiration came from complex immersive sims, like Deus Ex and Dishonored. “Part of the reason those games are so compelling is you, as a person playing the video game, choose to do something and the game can perceive that, acknowledge it, and respond to it,” he explains. “That response doesn’t have to be a prize, but it’s just about being in conversation with the player.”
To ground you in that world, Campo Santo reached for a greater physicality than other walking simulators. Again, they looked at what was being done in the first-person shooters they admired. “The map in Firewatch is 100% lifted from Far Cry 2,” Anderson points out, explaining what they were grasping for, “We all really enjoyed very embodied first person things. Obviously not full-on, frickin’ immersive sim level of stuff, but closer to that than not. We were going to richly simulate a relatively small suite of interactions, and deeply commit to those.”
“The map in Firewatch is 100% lifted from Far Cry 2.”
An early addition was a padlock which you hold in your virtual hand and roll the combination dials. Throughout the world of Firewatch you find lock boxes where the different rangers and lookouts can store shared equipment. Early boxes hold tools like the flashlight that you need when exploring caves, but often they are simply a place where staff leave notes for one another, share books, and stash things they’ve found in the forest – antlers and pinecones, for instance. While each box is sealed with a padlock, all the codes are the same: one, two, three, four.
“I absolutely love that stupid gag with the padlocks,” Remo says. “The padlock was one of the first things I put sound in for. That little tick tick tick. One of the things I loved so much about it is the restraint. We made a system that could support any password. It didn’t have to be ‘one, two, three, four,’ we just decided fictionally this is actually what these people would do. This is not some person with an IT department who’s saying, ‘Please change your password, every three months. This isn’t strong enough.’ These are people out in the woods trying to do their jobs. They don’t care. They’re not worried about someone coming and stealing an antler from their box, they just do the thing that’s easy for them to remember and it’s easy to tell the next guy. But it still used a video game mechanic to do it.”
In another game, you would find padlock codes carved into the walls of abandoned lodges, scribbled into the corners of notes, or etched in chalk on a cave wall. But in Firewatch, the code remains one, two, three, four throughout. Except for in one instance where Delilah has to come up with a new code in a rush. She picks five, six, seven, eight.
An interactive padlock may not sound groundbreaking, but it was essential for establishing the reality of Firewatch’s world. “In most of these games still, and certainly the ones that came before,” Anderson says, “you’re just a camera with a highlight and you push ‘E’ to interact. It sounds glib, but you don’t have hands. To this day, one of my favourite games ever is Mirror’s Edge. There is almost nothing, still, [that] compares to the embodied physicality in that game. Obviously, in Firewatch you’re not doing a cool parkour off a roof, but the principles that animated that were the same.”
Pick up a book in Firewatch, for example, and it won’t simply appear as a 3D object you can fully rotate. Instead, you can rotate it to the left to look at the cover and rotate it to the right to read the blurb. It is as though you are holding the book by its spine and twisting your wrist to look at it one way and then another. ” Something happens when you can take a thing in your hand and look at it versus you picking it up and then it just floats, and when you push ‘E’ again it falls to the ground,” Anderson says. “You’re not losing anything from that, but you are gaining something when you have your human hand.” These are all small interactions but they add up to a “gestalt”, as Anderson puts it, “The place feels grounded and tangible and real in a way that it’s not quite the same when you’re just a floating eyeball with a telekinesis ‘E’ button.”
Finding the correct level of interactivity and knowing when to pull back wasn’t clear cut. “We prototyped a lot more gameplay than what we ended up putting in the game,” Remo says. At one point you could use the Osborne Fire Finder in your lookout station to give a directional bearing on a smoke bearing to firefighters. And, before deciding to simply add maps to the inside of the ranger boxes’ lids, you would add detail to your map by triangulating your position using landmarks in the world, a mechanic lifted from survival game Miasmata. The guiding principle of what stayed in or was cut was whether a mechanic risked moving Firewatch out of the walking simulator genre. “We wanted the player to be interacting with something that felt like a crunchy mechanical video game, but then not to actually rely on that for the friction that gets you through the story,” Remo says, the stuff that “stops you from just dashing straight to the end.”
If embodying physicality was Campo Santo’s first big ambition for Firewatch, their second was making a walking simulator story that took place in the present. Pointing to the games that came before and many that have been released since, Anderson explains that “you’re playing some combination of a detective and an archivist,” Anderson says. “You’re at this place and you’re trying to figure out what happened.” While that can be “fucking cool and compelling” there isn’t the same tension that comes from a story that is happening in the here and now.
“From the beginning, we baked in the idea that you’re talking to somebody else on the radio.”
While there is a past in Firewatch, with the mystery of what happened to a previous lookout and his son bubbling through your conversation with Delilah, that mystery doesn’t stay put. “You’re not just finding audio logs or notes,” Remo says. “The events of the past catch up to you and things are happening that put you in danger in the present.”
As to why narrative exploration games before and rarely since have told their stories in the present? “It’s really hard,” Anderson says.
“If you don’t have combat, if you don’t have complex puzzles, and fully animated 3D characters who can walk around in front of you – which is budgetarily, very expensive – it’s very difficult to represent a present tense story in a video game,” Remo says. Comparing it to film, where, he says, having two people talk to each other is one of the easiest things you can do. “You can cut in a few close-ups and you get infinite expressivity of a good actor basically for free. 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.”
“You could do something present tense where there aren’t any other characters,” Anderson says, “but the constraints of actions happening around you [that] somehow don’t ever involve seeing other people pushes you down very specific avenues. From the beginning, we baked in the idea that you’re talking to somebody else on the radio. We don’t have to carry the cost of having to animate and put another person on the screen all the time [but] there’s still another character.”
Anderson says that Duncan Jones’s 2009 movie Moon, which stars multiple clones of Sam Rockwell dealing with their mortality while stranded on a lunar base, was a big influence. (He pithily summarises it as the film where “where this sad Man is on the moon having a time”.) Jones created a story and production that leaned into the constraints of the budget, picking a lunar setting and telling a story of isolation, so viewers would never ask why there were so few people on screen. Campo Santo did the same: “Why aren’t there other people around? You’ve taken a job in the middle of goddamn nowhere,” Anderson says. “That is just a big part of the challenge, if [a project’s] not made by a kabillion people.”
“The conclusion I came to is it’s actually not only fine, it’s maybe better that this game doesn’t have a huge overwhelming video game soundscape.”
Limited budget pushed many on the team to take on new roles. Remo, for instance, joined the team as a game designer, but ended up working on the story, composing the score, and becoming Firewatch’s audio director. While he had composed the score for Gone Home, he had never worked as an audio director. “That was nerve-wracking,” Remo admits. “It’s a very specialised skill. There are people who do it who are absolutely brilliant.”
However, as they had with the setting and story, Remo leaned into the constraints. “There was never going to be a world in which I created an unbelievable, technical masterpiece of sound design and ambiance,” he says. It was just beyond his abilities. So instead he aimed smaller. “I thought, ‘Okay, well, what is this game about? It’s about solitude, it’s about both being one small person in a vast physical environment and the grandeur of nature surrounding you, but also more metaphorically, it’s about scrabbling at things bigger than you can understand or affect, or fix, and how do you reckon with that? And how do you manage to still live as a human being knowing that you’re this tiny speck in the machinations and grand systems of human existence.’ It sounds really pompous when I say it that way but it was really helpful to think about those thematic elements when working on the sound design because the conclusion I came to is it’s actually not only fine, it’s maybe better that this game doesn’t have a huge overwhelming video game soundscape.”
Remo remembered the trip out into the Yosemite National Park. The silence interrupted by the smallest sounds. “What it should be is something quiet and subtle, where you hear just the rustling of the wind through the trees and your footsteps crunching through the grass,” Remo says. “It actually speaks to the themes better. Video games often have these very tactile, hypersensory sounds and haptic feedback [and] that’s actually not right for this game.”
Likewise, with the music, Remo reasons that if he were a more experienced composer with access to an orchestra there could be a “really great soundtrack” for Firewatch that used an entire ensemble. However, he hadn’t composed for large ensembles and they didn’t have the resources to hire one, so instead he composed for the instruments he could play himself. “I had to think ‘How can this work for the game rather than feel like we’re cheaping out or that we didn’t have enough time’.” Which is how the team landed on a much simpler score.
“There aren’t huge opportunities to work on things like this in video games.”
“By about halfway through development, I remember feeling ‘Right, these are the principles. These are the pillars. This is what we’re going for here,'” Remo says, and by the end thinking “‘God, if we made this exact same game again now, starting with what we know, we could take these ideas so much further.'”
Watch on YouTube
Campo Santo did start working on a game that would have developed those learnings: In The Valley Of The Gods. Revealed at The Game Awards in 2017, months before Camp Santo acquired Valve, Remo says the game was “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, after the team was acquired by Valve, they began assisting on other projects, such as Half-Life: Alyx, Dota Underlords, and Artifact. By 2019, In The Valley Of The Gods was put on hold. Remo says it’s “probably unlikely to be released at this point.”
I ask Remo if he’s had the chance to apply what he learned on Firewatch in other games. “There aren’t huge opportunities to work on things like this in video games, which is a shame because these are the kinds of stories I like,” he says. “I would say less than I would have hoped. But I worked on Half-Life: Alyx and a couple of Life Is Strange [games] and 100 percent there were things learned in the making of Firewatch that found their way into those games.”
There was another project after Firewatch that allowed him to crystallise the theories developed at Campo Santo. “I gave this talk that I kept refining about reactive narrative gameplay, the best version of which I gave at GDC,” Remo says. “I’m very happy with that talk, and it feels that that is my final word on these narrative and design elements. Firewatch is the creative expression of them and then this talk was the critical expression of these ideas.”
In Anderson’s case, he had already left Campo Santo at the point it was acquired by Valve. One reason was that the Campo Santo studio was based in San Francisco, while he lived in Vancouver and had no intention of leaving. “The Vancouver game development scene is, in my opinion, one of the best in the entire goddamn world,” he says. “And there were so many folks I knew here who I wanted to work with.” But also, he had fulfilled his ambition – he had wanted to make a first-person narrative game and now he wanted to try something else.
Looking across Anderson’s CV, you can see he doesn’t stick to the same genre. He’s worked on the Diablo-like Deathspank, 2D platformer Mark Of The Ninja, walking simulator Firewatch, and now he’s working on citybuilder Generation Exile, a game in which you play as the commander of a colony ship as it spends decades travelling through space.
There may not appear to be much overlap between Firewatch and Generation Exile, but Anderson argues that “There are lower level animating sensibilities that are very similar.” As the Caretaker of the generation ship, it falls to you not just to place air filters and build algae farms to keep your population breathing and fed, you also make choices that impact the direction your colonies’ culture and politics will develop.
“In Generation Exile, you are a specific person,” Anderson says. “We’re going to have these 3D narrative events where you’re in the scene talking to this other person. The stuff that happens in there can then affect some number that is more like society, spaceship level, but finding ways to still keep that grounded and present was not unrelated to what similarly animated Firewatch. Even though moment-to-moment is far more about making sure all the non-people [on the station] have enough cricket gruel to eat.”
“I do think we were trying to do something different.”
While the term ‘walking simulator’ no longer carries the same negative connotations it did a decade ago, which even then had eroded since Dear Esther’s launch in 2011, Remo admits hoping Firewatch “would point the way towards its own sub-genre”, one defined by reactive storytelling. “A lot of people say this is just another walking simulator [but] I do think we were trying to do something different”.
Still, while Firewatch didn’t have the impact Remo had hoped, it had one he hadn’t expected. “In the years since the game’s release, we’ve received countless messages from people who were inspired to become firewatch lookouts, or even just to take up hiking,” Remo says. “I find that to be incredibly moving. It takes me all the way back to the first team building experience out in Yosemite.”
