I was thinking about In The Valley of Gods last week, as I’m wanton to do. I’m playing The Invincible at the moment, which is basically a sci-fi walking simulator in the vein of Firewatch, and I got wistful. Seven and a half years after Campo Santo’s stunning debut, the studio’s next game is still over half a decade away, if Steam is to be believed.

Steam says that In The Valley of Gods is due to release in December 2029, so it’s officially six years away now, provided it doesn’t get delayed again. As good as Firewatch was, there’s no reason an Egyptian archeology version of it would take 13 years to make. This goes double seeing as, soon after the release of Firewatch, Campo Santo was acquired by Valve in order to better allow them to succeed.

Except, that hasn’t quite happened. Since the indie studio’s acquisition, co-founders Sean Vanaman and Jake Rodkin have only been credited on Half-Life: Alyx. Rodkin has separately worked as an interface designer on Sam & Max Save the World Remastered, but fans were hoping for a masterful follow-up to Firewatch, not an unspecified role in Valve’s VR project.

Nobody knows what’s happening with In The Valley of Gods. Valve’s structure is completely opaque, even to many within the organisation, and despite its pledges to allow Campo Santo full autonomy, it’s hard not to believe that In The Valley of Gods has been completely shelved.

In that 2018 IGN interview, Vanaman said that a corporation wouldn’t kill Campo Santo or In The Valley of Gods. “The thing that was going [to] kill our game wasn't an overlord. It's never going to be that. That's just not what exists here [at Valve],” he said. He also explained that they had been operating independently but pulling additional help from Valve’s other employees while necessary.

Vanaman also said at this point, shortly after the acquisition, that a part of the excitement of joining the gaming behemoth was the fact that he, “can't imagine the next thing I'm working on,” which turned out to be Alyx. This begs the question of whether the problem is Valve itself eating up a small studio, or whether Campo Santo’s employees are having their heads turned away from In The Valley of Gods by exciting projects being developed adjacent to them.

All of this is conjecture, but Firewatch fans are reaching for any possibility as to why Campo Santo’s follow up could be taking so long. The game is due 11 years after the Valve acquisition, and people want to know what’s going on, especially since updates have been few and far between.

Games take a long time to make. I get it. But games of this size, developed by teams with a Valve budget behind them, don’t take a decade. However, there may be hope yet. December 2029, the purported release date of Campo Santo’s second game, is the last month of this decade. Perhaps it’s just a random month generated that’s a long time away because Valve doesn’t want to release an actual date just yet.

This idea is compounded by the body text of the Steam page, which says, “In the Valley of Gods is currently in development and does not yet have a release date”. However, this could also just be another sign of neglect for a game that has long since been forgotten about. Slap a date on, call it a day, don’t bother to update anything else.

One of the few updates we have heard is from a Polygon interview with Rodkin in 2019. He explained that “Valve Time” worked differently, and Campo Santo developers had been distributed to work on games like Alyx and Dota Underlords. However, it was his last comment that was most revealing: “As of today, In the Valley of Gods development is on hold—but it certainly feels like a project people can and may return to.”

I want In The Valley of Gods to release, I really do. But I’m not hopeful. It sure seems like Campo Santo has been sacrificed for the greater good of Valve, put to work in the content mines to produce new skins for CS:GO 2 or something. We don’t know this is the case, and the developers could be happily working away on their magnum opus, but I know enough about billion-dollar corporations to tell you that if there isn’t lots of profit in the immediate future, they’re not interested. In The Valley of Gods could be a masterpiece, it would probably sell far better than Firewatch – thanks to the developer’s past success, the anticipation of fans, the more appealing setting of ancient Egypt, and a Valve-sized marketing budget – but is ‘selling better than Firewatch’ on the same level as ‘contributing to one of the company’s live-service machines’?

Campo Santo tried something different, and crafted a game that shaped a genre. I pray to Amun that it can work its magic on another special title soon. I hope that title is In The Valley of Gods, but I’d take anything under the Campo Santo banner at this point.

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