Campo Santo hit a home run with Firewatch, but the studio’s next game, In the Valley of Gods, appears to be having some development issues, and might even be canceled. The bad news started when three of the developers behind the game changed their Twitter bios. Artist Jane Ng, Art Director Claire Hummel, and Designer Jake Rodkin have all removed any reference to In the Valley of Gods from their Twitter bios, now simply referencing working for Valve.
In addition to this, In the Valley of Gods has been sort of removed from Campo Santo’s official website. The game no longer displays on the home page, although if you click on the development blog button it reappears. Oddly enough, instead of actually removing it, Campo Santo has just commented it out from the code, meaning it can be readded simply by removing the comment code. It was also noted that the announcement trailer for the game was removed from YouTube, something that happened back in April. However, Jake Rodkin commented on Reddit that the reason was that the music license expired for the track featured in the trailer. Since development changed hands from Campo Santo to Valve it would be a little too difficult to renegotiate the license, so they just chose to remove the trailer instead.
In the Valley of Gods is being developed by Campo Santo, the developers behind the popular narrative game Firewatch. The game was originally announced back during the 2017 Game Awards. Last year Campo Santo was purchased by Valve, though the developers promised nothing would be changing in how the game was developed. Campo Santo also promised that, despite the purchase, they would still be releasing regular blog posts about the development of the game. However, the only blog post from the team since the acquisition was announcing that Firewatch had been released on the Nintendo Switch. It was expected to launch sometime this year on PC with a console version following later. No additional news has been announced since its initial reveal.
[sources: Valve News Network, Reddit]
