Firewatch Helped Pioneer A Genre That Burned Brightly But Briefly

Firewatch celebrated its 10-year anniversary on February 9, 2025. Below, we examine the origins of the so-called “walking simulator” and why the fire appears to have died out.

When Firewatch launched on February 9th, 2016, it was easy to relate to the game’s leads, Henry and Delilah. These characters spent a summer staring down as fire spread, slowly filling the forest around their watchtowers with smoke. Observers of the “walking sim” genre saw a similar blaze burn across the decade. It began with Dear Esther, sparked to scorching flame with the friction of Gone Home’s release, and became a towering creative inferno with modern classics like Firewatch and What Remains of Edith Finch. As the 2010s came to a close, fans expected the fire to continue raging through the ’20s.

Instead, it burned out. A decade after Campo Santo released this deeply human game about paranoia in a national park, walking sims have fallen from mainstream prominence. It’s not that no one is making them anymore–there are tiny indies available on platforms like itch.io. But the teams that made the defining games have spun their wheels, sold their studios, or split. And The Game Awards nominations have dried up, too. Despelote is the only game in the genre to receive recognition this decade with two nods, compared to five for Firewatch, three noms and one win for Edith Finch, a Games for Impact nod for Sunset, and a Best Independent Game nomination for The Vanishing of Ethan Carter–all in a three-year span. In the 2010s, every year or two saw the release of an iconic, widely discussed entry, but we’re six years into the 2020s and still waiting.

So what happened? Where did games like Firewatch go? Where did they come from in the first place? And what even is a walking simulator anyway?

Firewatch

First Things First

If you want to understand how walking sims captured gaming’s imagination in the 2010s, Firewatch is a great place to start. Like most titles in the genre, it is a combat-free, story-focused first-person game about a lone character exploring an unpopulated space. In Firewatch, that space was a largely empty Shoshone National Park. In Fullbright’s Gone Home, it was an abandoned family home in the Pacific Northwest. In its follow-up, Tacoma, it was a space station in the wake of its crew’s mysterious disappearance.

Isolation was a feature, not a bug, but these games used off-screen characters to soften their inherent loneliness. In The Stanley Parable, a posh narrator described your every move, encouraging or discouraging certain courses of action. In Tacoma, you watched hologram recordings of the station’s missing inhabitants. In What Remains of Edith Finch, you became each of the characters who had abandoned the sprawling house, playing as them through short vignettes.

Firewatch casts players as Henry, a man who takes an isolated job at a lookout tower in the Wyoming woods to escape a difficult marriage. As you explore the forest, compass and map at the ready, you speak to your charismatic supervisor, Delilah, by radio. And that, mechanically speaking, is basically it. Firewatch is an excellent story with well-realized, flawed, human characters. The few things you do are vehicles for Campo Santo to tell that story.

The genre’s lack of mechanical depth made it possible for indie teams to make games with high production value, and that was certainly the case for Firewatch. Though it was made by a small crew–Campo Santo was just 12 developers strong as of 2018–it looked and sounded like something made by a much larger studio. Its art style was painterly, emphasizing gorgeous color over realism. Its UI was minimalist but stylish. Its script boasted pages of strong writing; if Henry saw something in the world, he could pull up his walkie-talkie and Delilah would have something to say about it. And though there were only two major voice roles, both were acted to perfection.

Side note: Though the “walking simulator” name has since been used to describe games like Death Stranding and Baby Steps, which explore and derive challenge from the mechanics of walking, the games that gave the genre its name weren’t all that interested in walking. It was just the main action left over once developers stripped out shooting, puzzle-solving, and other familiar game-y actions.

A Lost Generation

The devs that ended up making this kind of game were either scaling up or scaling down. Early titles like Dear Esther and The Stanley Parable started out as Half-Life 2 mods, before their developers reworked them as standalone releases. And Gone Home and Firewatch were both made by triple-A expats, devs who had left bigger studios behind to blaze their own trail. The core Fullbright team started working together at 2K Marin while making BioShock 2’s Minerva’s Den DLC. And Campo Santo’s Jake Rodkin and Sean Vanaman both hailed from Telltale, where they had helped lead development on The Walking Dead.

Firewatch

With that formula, it seems like walking sims could continue to thrive in the 2020s. With widespread layoffs, there are more unemployed developers with triple-A experience than ever before. And with established devs having honed their skills in the 2010s, it seemed reasonable to expect them to return in the 2020s with more advanced, more complicated, more mature expansions of the genre.

But that hasn’t been the case. The developers who pioneered the genre mostly stopped making games–either in the genre, or altogether.

Fullbright split in two after allegations of toxic behavior against co-founder Steve Gaynor. The studio’s walking sim follow-up, Open Roads, was released in 2024 under the studio name Open Roads Team. It made little impression and earned middling reviews. Gaynor maintained the rights to the Fullbright name and has used it for his own projects, like 2024’s Fullbright Presents Toilet Spiders–a horror game about, you guessed it, spiders in toilets. His next game, Springs, Eternal, looks to be more in line with the games that put Fullbright on the map, a PS1-inspired horror title about exploring a “a secluded hot springs in the dead of night.” But Fullbright, as we knew it, doesn’t exist anymore.

What Remains of Edith Finch turns nine this April, but its creator, Giant Sparrow, has said little about its nature-focused next project since 2017. According to its barebones website, it plans to staff up in mid-2026. Davey Wreden, who co-developed The Stanley Parable, made a walking sim follow-up, The Beginner’s Guide, in 2015. Outside of small games released on itch.io, Wreden was largely quiet until last year’s Wanderstop, a cozy game. Brendon Chung, who made the small but influential Thirty Flights of Loving reversed the process that led to the creation of the walking sim, adding mechanics back in. His latest, Skin Deep, is a good, old-fashioned immersive sim.

And Campo Santo, which was set to evolve its take on the genre with an Egypt-set first-person adventure titled In the Valley of Gods, was acquired by Valve in 2018. The game was put on ice. Its Steam page is still up, though its release date is set to the faraway December 2029 and, as far as we know, it remains on hold. That acquisition wasn’t entirely bad news. Several members of the team played key roles on the excellent Half-Life: Alyx. But it does mean that a major player in the genre has taken itself off the table.

The Chinese Room, which made Dear Esther, is one of the few studios that continues to make first-person adventures. But it has stuck to horror with Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs and Still Wakes the Deep, giving its games an easier-to-sell genre component. It also highlights how easy it is to make games that aren’t walking sims. When a genre is defined by what it excludes, it’s easy for a game to iterate its way out.

We Need A Nice, Long Walk

An inhospitable industry hasn’t helped. As mentioned above, layoffs have been widespread in the 2020s, with many developers leaving the games industry entirely. The “indiepocalypse” that many feared in the 2010s is here: The market is overcrowded, and standing out is harder than ever. Walking sims were high on production value and light on mechanics, but the breakout indies of the 2020s have reversed that formula. Balatro, Vampire Survivors, and Megabonk look like they could have come out in 1998 but hook players with inviting mechanical depth.

Walking sims, more than most genres, would benefit from industry stability. A game like Firewatch requires patience to create and patience to appreciate. When it launched in 2016, multiple critics compared it to a good book. It isn’t flashy, doesn’t have a big high-concept mechanical hook, and won’t make players say, “Just one more round.” But it rewards your time with a story well-told, an abiding sense of atmosphere, and unforgettable characters. If that isn’t worth investing time and money in, what is?