Cozy Grove: Camp Spirit is a lesson in how to write compelling NPCs

In the world of Cozy Grove, it won’t be long before you have a favorite bear. Most non-player characters in Cozy Grove: Camp Spiritthe continuation of Cozy Grove Released to Netflix users on June 25, the films feature bear-shaped ghosts coming to terms with the lives they have lived, whether that reflection is marked by pride, fear, or even unresolved disputes.

The bears need your help too – you’ll spend the game running errands around the haunted island and helping the ghosts deal with their deaths. Some want to teach you skills they learned while alive, others want your advice on conflict resolution, and still others just need someone to listen to their story for the first time. Their melancholy tales are told through cheeky dialogue that propelled me through my playthrough of the first game, and their creation is a testament to the care the developers at Spry Fox put into their characters.

Camp spiritNotable bears include Kumari and Medvarius, former business partners with very different philosophies; Kyli, the streamer/influencer who can’t stop thinking about her audience; and Bunch, the chef portrayed as a box of crayons. Spry Fox presents these bears’ tragic stories with a lightness that seems natural: Kumari takes a shot at Medvarius before sharing that she feels betrayed by his greed; Kyli extols her confidence and fame until they have to admit that no one listens to their podcast. The interactions are realistic, like an acquaintance or neighbor might share vulnerable moments with someone they just met.

Image: Spry Fox/Netflix

Some bears open up immediately and are desperate to share their heritage with others. Others will refuse more than kindness until you show them that you are consistent, helpful, and friendly. Most are somewhere in between—just like humans, lead author Jamie Antonisse told Polygon in a recent interview.

“There are some bears, like some people, who never feel comfortable being hugged. That’s a bit of a spoiler for the game. You can do as much as you want, they’re just not huggers,” said Antonisse, who wrote both games in the series. “Very often you just want to give the player anything that makes them feel good. But again, Spry Fox is really wonderful. It’s a team where you can talk about intentionally not letting a bear hug you and what that means to them.”

Antonisse said these decisions came from the same feeling the game wants to inspire in its players: connection. In order to realistically represent which bears want to hug you and which don’t, the team had to become vulnerable, and that vulnerability can be felt while playing.

It is this visibility of developers that makes writing in Cozy Grove: Camp Spirit a great example of how to tell a story that honors the people behind it without inadvertently making them the subject of the game.

“The core of a [Cozy Grove] Story is a character that usually has a basis in someone one of the authors knows, or a problem that someone [on the team] “We sometimes dig into some kind of ghostly regret or something that we think is a common theme that many people have experienced and come up with a story that we want to tell over time.”

Antonisse said the goal is that when players meet new bears, they first feel joy and then empathy. The experience of joy and then empathy is the case with many cozy games. Thunder Lotus’ Ghost driverfor example, similarly reveals NPC stories over time that are initially silly or intriguing and quickly evolve into nuanced stories that you might still be thinking about even after you’ve stopped playing. Antonisse pointed out a difference with these types of cozy characters: The interactions don’t stop evolving after that empathy is established.

“And finally, we want you to come to an insight together with the character that can help her and perhaps real people as well,” said Antonisse.

Image: Spry Fox/Netflix

In Camp spiritThe bears are even deeper and more fascinating than in the last game. Antonisse said the stories are about twice as long, so you can be sure you’ll have plenty to discover for a long time to come. And for the first time, the game features bears who knew each other in life, so there’s a lot more material for the stories that could emerge from getting to know both sides of a situation.

Take Bunch, the bear with the crayon box, who touts his love of cooking throughout the game. At first, Bunch serves to introduce players to the cooking mechanics. But as you keep passing by Bunch, you might wonder why he is portrayed as an object that has nothing to do with cooking at all, and also contains many details that lend themselves to metaphors, like his missing crayon or the one that is worn down to a stub.

“One of the things that I think is really crucial to Bunch is this idea of ​​layers – of someone who you initially perceive in one way, and someone who perceives themselves in another way. A humble person who somehow sees themselves as I’m here to help, don’t worry about mebut that has a lot of depth beneath the surface,” Antonisse said. “He teaches you different skills, he teaches you what he knows, but pretty early on. And you’ll find that Bunch’s knowledge in that regard – as a chef and as someone who can teach cooking – is something he has a really complicated relationship with. That’s not his first passion.”

Photo: Noemí Gómez Nogales/Spry Fox

Photo: Noemí Gómez Nogales/Spry Fox

Photo: Noemí Gómez Nogales/Spry Fox

In her warm-up sketch, Noemí Gómez Nogales depicted Bunch as a tube of paint. In the first and final sketches, he takes the form of a box of colored pencils.

Antonisse said the decision to make Bunch a box of pencils came from lead concept artist Noemí Gómez Nogales, who read Bunch’s storyline and understood that the way players view the character at the beginning will likely change. Bunch’s story eventually moves away from his interest in cooking and actually questions it – so much so that portraying him as a chef, and only a chef, would neglect the character’s complexity.

“How do you connect people with characters that inspire them every day and tell them really different stories?” Antonisse wondered aloud. “It’s a good stimulus. It makes you stretch and think about stories beyond the screen and beyond what you do.”

Cozy Grove: Camp Spirit is certainly not an uncomfortable game, despite the sometimes serious nature of the stories it tells – the coziness is undeniable, and the relaxed nature of completing tasks is much more of a joy than a drudgery. But where other cozy games want to give players a place to escape, Camp spirit seems to want to teach players empathy, the ability to listen, and an understanding of complexity that they can (or must) apply in their real lives.

Moreover, it creates a wonderful balance that acknowledges the world we live in without, as Antonisse puts it, “being a Saturday Night Live Sketch.” There is the description for spice, a crafting item, which reads: “Why is it spicy?” in reference to the viral TikTokOr the dialogue that makes fun of Netflix, the new owner of Spry Fox.

Image: Spry Fox/Netflix

There are countless moments that many players will likely miss, but for Spry Fox and Antonisse, that’s part of the fun. They don’t know how many players will understand the social media references, identify with Kumari’s business decisions, or appreciate the origami swans on the island. But it doesn’t matter if every player sees every moment, because some details say as much about the team that made them and the moment they made them as they do about the game’s player.

“I think you see the challenges between communities and developers and expectations,” Antonisse said of the industry in general. “They have ever higher expectations of sometimes very small teams, to make ever more elaborate games to keep up with what they see. [from players]. This desire to be seen is a desire to narrow the gap between the expectations of the community and what a small studio can achieve.”