Introducing the Valley of Gods

In the Valley of Gods, Campo Santo’s second video game after Firewatch, is about two women making a movie.

It’s 1928, the women are Rashida and Zora, and they’re shooting their movie in Egypt, to whose ancient necropolises and tombs the title In the Valley of Gods alludes. (There is an actual Valley of the Gods, in Utah, but the game isn’t set there. However, the Utah Valley did feature in Airwolf, the ’80s TV show about a helicopter — in fact, it’s where the helicopter’s house was.)

Rashida and Zora are documentary filmmakers, a term that would be brand new to them. Campo Santo’s Sean Vanaman described them to me as explorer-filmmakers, which is closer to the heart of the early, experimental decades of their profession, marked by rapid advances in technology and form, accelerated by a loose approach to ethics and documentary responsibility. I’m thinking of Jacques Cousteau, capturing gorgeous ocean shots by throwing dynamite into it, and waiting with a camera for fish corpses to come bubbling to the surface.

Or the more figurative annihilation of Robert Flaherty, a contemporary of Rashida and Zora’s, whose groundbreaking 1922 documentary Nanook of the North introduced much of the world to Inuit society and culture, but was staged to present the Inuk cast as more primitive than they were. (“One often has to distort a thing in order to catch its true spirit,” Flaherty offered in 1949 as a defense of his work — which doesn’t quite explain why he wanted the women of his 1926 Samoa film Moana to go topless.)

Where Rashida and Zora will fit into this tradition, we don’t yet know. But we know their subject matter, and where they’re going, there are no live bodies to take their tops off or be exploded.

When we meet them in the late twenties, modern Egypt is exiting a golden age of Egyptian archaeology: a boom century of frequent, high-yield discoveries of ancient treasure, art and culture, every other artifact rewriting ancient biographies.

It’s a world of casual destruction — Giovanni Belzoni, ex-circus strongman, grinding mummies into dust beneath his boots — fierce professional competition, and the gauzy romance of adventurers discovering ancient secrets buried in the sands of Egypt. Rashida, Zora and the world have just seen Howard Carter and his patron George Herbert crack into the virginal treasure chambers of Tutankhamun, capturing a legendary prize and the world’s fascination.

“Can you see anything?” Herbert called out to his friend. “Yes,” Carter cried back: “Wonderful things!” (Herbert died the next year from a mosquito bite, decidedly not a wonderful thing. Or an exciting one, which is probably why his death was immediately rewritten in the popular imagination to be the result of a vengeful mummy’s curse — an exotic embellishment with more seductive appeal than a blood infection.)

For Rashida and Zora, that’s the scene. Two people — disgraced, down on their luck, having no interest in the spoils but a hunger for the truth — trying to succeed in a world where men wheel and deal for trophies. That’s the challenge. That’s the game.

“Firewatch was this wonderful affirmation that the thing we like about games a whole bunch of other folks like about games, too. And that is being the protagonist in a wild, unexpected story that is happening to you, in real time.” Sean Vanaman tells me. “I’m one of those Indiana Jones kids to the max. [But] I’ve just yet to play something that was an exploration-adventure story that, on one hand, has all the fun of something like Indiana Jones but then eschewed violence as a core mechanic and felt like it was about adults.”

So: Why Egypt? Why that as the follow-up to the Wyoming national forest of Firewatch?

I have one theory, which goes back to George Herbert — he of the cursed bug bite — and the fact that his great-grandnephew is working on this game.

Aubrey Hesselgren, a programmer who joined Campo Santo last year, is the great-grandson of Aubrey Herbert, George’s half-brother. If your family has to endure the stigma of triggering a mummy’s curse — if Arthur Conan Doyle, of all people, persuaded the superstitious western World that your great-granduncle desecrated an ancient tomb, so got his clock cleaned by an exotic Egyptian monster in revenge — it seems fair that you get to make a video game about Egypt at some point.

But the connection is coincidental, and Hesselgren is more into first-person movement mechanics than exploring the legacy of his famous ancestor in a video game. (“I’ve had some mosquito bites from time to time, and they’re fine,” he joked to me.)

The actual reason why Campo Santo’s second game takes place in Egypt, Vanaman tells me, is Claire Hummel, who succeeds Firewatch’s Olly Moss as the studio’s art director. Hummel’s portfolio — which includes concept art for Bioshock Infinite, Obduction, and a Westworld VR experience; re-imaginings of Disney princesses in period-accurate garb; and RuPaul’s Drag Race fan art — is lovingly and critically attuned to historical detail and historical fashion in particular. Her work is exciting, suggesting deep interiority, adventures just beyond the frame, worlds that feel authentic but somehow better.

“I’ve always been interested in Ancient Egypt,” she tells me. “I drew a lot of Egyptian-inspired art growing up, wrote my AP art history essay on Akhenaten, took classes in hieroglyphs when I was in college. In it to win it. But eventually that fascination with Ancient Egypt evolved into a fascination with the modern perception of Ancient Egypt — the cultural appropriation innate in Western “egyptomania,” the birth of Egyptology as a scientific field and its intersection with Egyptian national identity, the founding fathers’ weird attempts to draw parallels between young America and Ancient Egypt…. it’s extremely interesting to deconstruct how it’s been used and politicized by different parties down the centuries.

“When we were staring at a blank slate, trying to come up with a setting for Game 2, Sean was paging through my portfolio and pulled [a piece called 1923] asking me to tell him about it. [After] a weekend of research Sean had a rough idea of what the next game could be. Women, 1920s Egypt, character-driven, and ideally avoiding all of the pulpy gimmicks and pitfalls that most media set in Egypt tends to fall into.”

This game is years away and just beginning. Nobody knows what it’s going to be yet.

But:

The creators of Firewatch. Adventure stories featuring adult problems. The art of ancient Egypt. The art of modern Egypt. First-person movement and a family curse. The golden age of Egyptology. The birth of documentary film. An old, analog film camera. Two women. A mystery.

That makes a map. Let’s go there.

Thanks to Aisling Conlon, Aubrey Hesselgren, Claire Hummel, Jake Rodkin and Sean Vanaman