"You're not doing parkour off a roof, but the principles were the same": How the makers of Firewatch pulled from Mirror's Edge, Far Cry 2, and Bioshock to tell a new kind of story in a walking simulator
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."