One of many many sport studios smashed to items by Embracer Group has come again to life. Campfire Cabal, which was seemingly shut down in 2023 as a part of their father or mother company’s scorched earth “restructuring” coverage, have crawled out of the grave to announce they’re nonetheless round and, in actual fact, “by no means stopped working”. They have been making a brand new sport within the Expeditions collection of historic RPGs, and have been given “the inexperienced mild to reduce up and transition into full manufacturing.”
“We’re lastly able to reveal that Campfire Cabal was by no means shut down,” say the studio in a put up on their web site. What occurred, they are saying, is that the THQ-owned studio had been ordered to shut by Embracer two years in the past. However some settlement was reached to maintain the corporate going with a diminished headcount, and so they as an alternative lower an unknown variety of workers from payroll.
“Although we did should say goodbye to a lot of our colleagues, the studio survived and a compact workforce continued the mission we had began in 2022. On the finish of March of 2025, we acquired the inexperienced mild to reduce up and transition into full manufacturing.”
That mission is a brand new sport within the Expeditions collection of RPGs, which incorporates the classical centurion stomping of Expeditions: Rome, the top-down shield-battering of Expeditions: Viking, and gunpowdery land-grabbing of Expeditions: Conquistador. The studio aren’t saying way more in regards to the new sport, although. Solely that it will be “set in a brand new interval of our historical past and in a brand new a part of the world for the collection”. Expeditions: Mongol, anybody? Expeditions: Pirate? Expeditions: Islamic Golden Age? I assume we’ll discover out.
Expeditions: Rome had some repetitive quirks however was a “critically good – and lovingly detailed – romp by means of centurion occasions,” mentioned Nate in our evaluation. And Expeditions: Conquistador was known as “very fantastic” by Adam, who wrote in his evaluation that some elements had been a chore, however “the concentrate on tales and characters means that there’s nearly all the time at the least one attention-grabbing plot on the boil”.
It is best to know, nevertheless, that Campfire Cabal aren’t the unique studio who made the older Expeditions video games. That might be Logic Artists, who had been subsumed and digested by blockchain bullshit peddlars Dynasty Studios. However the Cabal have since develop into custodians of the collection below rights-holders THQ. As with many artistic studios, it is a bit of a Ship of Theseus state of affairs, considerably sophisticated by a spherical of layoffs and this subsequent reappearance. We’ll have to attend and see how the following entry carries the torch.
Even in case you aren’t that within the RPGs, the “revival” of a seemingly shuttered studio is attention-grabbing in a wider sense. It could possibly be seen as a hopeful sprout of inexperienced rising from a blackened earth laid naked by years of seemingly limitless layoffs. Or it might merely be the re-emergence of a scarred and injured physique from a bloody-watered moat, a studio bravely limping on despite the brutal overlord that threw them in there, alongside a bunch of different our bodies.
