A seaside resort town on England’s west coast, Southport might seem a left-field location to plot Campo Santo’s second act. It’s a profound change of scenery from the Bay Area and Firewatch’s chasmal wilderness. You’d go there for the seaside, for shopping, golf, flower shows, pleasure piers, and the theme park: Pleasureland. But all is not pleasurable: in 2009 and 2016, local teenagers set Pleasureland on fire. And Southport’s small zoo, a husband-and-wife operation, was shuttered in a furore over animal welfare. Now, you can play laser tag there, amongst the vacant cages.

Pleasureland on fire. (Image: Southport.gb.com)

James Benson’s lived in Southport since the early 1990s. Another notable resident: Napoleon Bonaparte’s nephew, Louis-Napoléon, who was briefly exiled there until he got bored. Like Bonaparte, the remoteness of Southport has frustrated Benson at times. He and art director Olly Moss were the only members of the Firewatch team not on Pacific Standard Time, which wasn’t intended to limit his involvement, but did in practise.

“I loved working with Campo, but on my previous game [Ori and the Blind Forest] I had been the co-designer, I had essentially been a lead on a fairly large team,” he says. “On Firewatch I did a little bit of design, but it was incredibly hard. I might have some ideas, but couldn’t communicate them until America came online, and then I wouldn’t really be available. The feedback loop was all wrong.”

After Firewatch’s release this February, with the core San Francisco team tied up with support, content updates and press, Benson spent a “listless” month in relative isolation, toying with ideas for the studio’s next project. After that first month, he’d show Campo Santo founders Jake Rodkin and Sean Vanaman what he’d done each week: typically two ideas, roughly prototyped and animated.

“I was trying to find a core gameplay conceit that you could build two to three years of a team’s life around, the equivalent of the radio in Firewatch.” Benson’s prototypes from this period included a pitch codenamed Southport, with an exaggerated take on a decaying, post-apocalyptic Pleasureland. “It was a slightly tough situation… it could absolutely be the case that the wider team came back and said ‘This isn’t the kind of stuff I’m interested in,’ because obviously all the ideas [only] shared the core theme of, ‘This is the kind of thing James cares about.’”

Nonetheless, Benson’s efforts gave Rodkin and Vanaman confidence in his input on the gameplay direction of the studio’s follow-up. They hired a UK-based programmer, Aubrey Hesselgren, to work with Benson on the prototypes, and in September, Benson and Hesselgren sat down with the rest of the team in San Francisco to talk about what people would and wouldn’t expect from a new game. They agreed, broadly, which concepts would become the foundation of the next game.

“It feels like, OK, we’re really making something again… Claire [Hummel, art director] came on board on a week ago, and the last bits of Firewatch support are petering out, Jake and Chris [Remo] have started working on the new project with me and Aubrey. And personally I am back in the position I want to be.”

Now that Benson knows what he’s making, what weighs most on his mind is navigating the public expectation for a Firewatch successor. “I feel pressure to message and market the game in a way that keeps a through-line from Game 1 to Game 2, [to] let the roughly million players of Firewatch know the things you love about Firewatch are still in this game’s DNA.”

What dangers lie past yonder bridge?

And then, there’s the sophomore slump: that superstition which dogs second outings with worries of a high-profile artistic fall. It’s been the ruin of many a college student, and True Detective. Could Campo Santo’s Game 2 fall short of the standard set by Firewatch? Could it be not just a lesser game than Firewatch, but a bad one? Could it be the thing that makes all that Campo Santo has built go away?

“I think it’s a real thing,” says Benson of the Slump. “Halfway through [making] Firewatch, Ori shipped, and did way better critically and commercially than I ever thought it would. I had a really bad ‘sophomore slump’ fear when Firewatch was coming out, because it was right during awards season for Ori.” Although, he clarifies, “when Firewatch was finished and came out, I was really happy with it — I didn’t and don’t feel like Firewatch is a slump for me.” But if Benson dodged the sophomore slump on Firewatch — could it still be out there? Like a Freddy Krueger, doing his best to scurry and hide behind the living room furniture?

I encouraged Benson to try a bit of classical conditioning, and train himself to associate the “the sophomore slump” not with a self-sabotaging fear of creative failure, but a fear of something else — like how baby Albert was jacked up with rat phobias and sent packing. I suggested that Benson think of the Sophomore Slump as more of a literal monster, a shambling arcane horror that feeds on college and high school sophomores — like really violently slaughters them. When something like that’s out prowling college campuses, who has time to worry about video games?

But Benson’s not overly concerned. “I think the slump happens when you do something once, and try and replicate it. It’s like telling a joke off-the-cuff, and then trying to do it again, and it comes out weird. It’s not funny the second time. I think the key is enough things need to change.

“If we were making Seawatch, I would be a bit scared, but we’re not, and there’s a lot of shake-up in the team. And then the game we’re making is just very different, we’re not really repeating a lot of what we did on Firewatch. It’s largely new problems to solve. I’m really not worried about it.”

So watch this space. And if all else fails, there’s always the Sophomore Slump to worry about instead:

The sophomore slumpus.

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“Southport Pier, High Tide” by Gidzy, licensed under CC BY 2.0

“Venetian Bridge” copyright Carron K, licensed for reuse under CC BY-SA 2.0