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 mum or dad company’s scorched earth “restructuring” policy, have crawled out of the grave to announce they’re nonetheless round and, in truth, “by no means stopped working”. They have been making a brand new sport within the Expeditions sequence 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 post on their website. What occurred, they are saying, is that the THQ-owned studio have 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 a substitute lower an unknown variety of staff from payroll.
“Although we did need to say goodbye to a lot of our colleagues, the studio survived and a compact staff continued the challenge 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 challenge is a brand new sport within the Expeditions sequence 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 rather more concerning 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 sequence”. Expeditions: Mongol, anybody? Expeditions: Pirate? Expeditions: Islamic Golden Age? I suppose we’ll discover out.
Expeditions: Rome had some repetitive quirks however was a “critically good – and lovingly detailed – romp via centurion occasions,” stated Nate in our review. And Expeditions: Conquistador was referred to as “very fantastic” by Adam, who wrote in his review that some components have been a chore, however “the give attention to tales and characters means that there’s nearly at all times at the least one attention-grabbing plot on the boil”.
You must know, nevertheless, that Campfire Cabal aren’t the unique studio who made the older Expeditions video games. That might be Logic Artists, who have been subsumed and digested by blockchain bullshit peddlars Dynasty Studios. However the Cabal have since grow to be custodians of the sequence below rights-holders THQ. As with many artistic studios, it is a bit of a Ship of Theseus scenario, 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 for those who 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 regardless of the brutal overlord that threw them in there, alongside a bunch of other bodies.
