"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...