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.