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 of the non-player characters in Cozy Grove: Camp Spirit, the sequel to Cozy Grove that was released to Netflix users on June 25, are bear-shaped ghosts reckoning with the life they lived, whether that reflection is tinged with pride, or fear, or even unresolved arguments.

The bears also need your help — you’ll spend the game running errands around the haunted island, aiding the spirits in processing their deaths. Some want to teach you skills they mastered when they were alive, others want your advice on resolving conflicts, and still others just need someone to listen to their story for the first time. Their melancholic stories are told through cheeky dialogue that propelled me through my playthrough of the first game, and their creation speaks to the care with which the developers at Spry Fox treat their characters.

Camp Spirit’s notable bears include Kumari and Medvarius, former business partners with very different philosophies; Kyli, the streamer/influencer who can’t stop thinking about their listenership; and Bunch, the chef illustrated as a box of colored pencils. Spry Fox presents these bears’ tragic stories with levity that feels organic: Kumari takes potshots at Medvarius before sharing that she feels betrayed by his greed. Kyli touts their confidence and fame until they have to admit that nobody is listening to their podcast. The interactions are realistic to the way an acquaintance or neighbor might share vulnerable moments with someone they just met.

Some bears open up right away, almost desperate to share their legacies. Others refuse anything more than pleasantries until you’ve shown them that you’re consistent, helpful, and kind. Most fall somewhere in between — just like humans, said lead writer Jamie Antonisse in a recent interview with Polygon.

“There are some bears, like some people, who are never going to be comfortable with a hug. That’s a little spoiler for the game. Do as much as you want, they’re just not a hugger,” said Antonisse, who wrote both games in the series. “Very commonly, you just want to give the player everything that will make them feel good. But that’s another place where Spry Fox is really wonderful. It’s a team where you can have a conversation about intentionally having a bear not be a hugger, and what that means about them.”

Antonisse said these decisions came out of the same feeling the game aims to foster in its players: connection. In order to talk about the realism of which bears want to hug you and which ones don’t, the team had to get vulnerable, and you can feel that vulnerability as you play.

It’s this visibility of the developers that makes the writing in Cozy Grove: Camp Spirit such an excellent example of telling a story that honors the people behind it without inadvertently making them the subjects of the game.

“The kernel of a [Cozy Grove] story is a character that usually has some basis in someone that one of the writers knows, or an issue that someone [on the team] has gone through,” said Antonisse. “Sometimes we dig into a type of ghostly regret, or a thing that we think is a common theme that a lot of people have experienced, and figure out a story that we want to tell over time.”

Antonisse said the goal is that, when players meet new bears, they feel delight first, then empathy. The delight-then-empathy experience is true of a lot of cozy games. Thunder Lotus’ Spiritfarer, for instance, similarly teases NPC stories over time that start as silly or intriguing and quickly become nuanced tales you might find yourself thinking about even after you stop playing. Antonisse pointed to a distinction in these types of cozy characters: The interactions don’t stop evolving after that empathy is established.

“Finally, we want you to come to join the character in a realization that can help them and maybe help real people,” Antonisse said.

In Camp Spirit, the bears are even deeper and more intriguing than in the last game. Antonisse said the narratives are about twice as long, so you can rest assured you’ll have plenty to discover for a long while yet. And, for the first time, the game has bears that knew each other when they were alive, so there’s a lot more fodder for the stories that might come out of learning two sides of a situation.

Take Bunch, the colored-pencil-box bear that touts his love for cooking throughout the game. At first, Bunch serves the purpose of introducing players to the cooking mechanics. But as you walk past Bunch time and time again, you might find yourself wondering why he’s represented as an object completely unrelated to cooking, and with plenty of details ripe for metaphor, too, like his missing colored pencil or the one worn down to a nub.

“One of the things that I think is really key for Bunch is this idea of layers — of somebody who you initially perceive one way, and someone who might perceive themselves one way. A humble person who sort of sees himself as, I’m here to help, don’t worry about me, but who has a lot of depth below the surface,” Antonisse said. “He’ll teach you various skills, he’ll teach you what he knows, but pretty early. And you’ll learn that what Bunch knows in that regard — as a cook and someone who can teach cooking — is something he has a really complicated relationship with. That’s not his first passion.”

Antonisse said the choice 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 see the character at the beginning is likely to change. Bunch’s story eventually expands away from his interest in cooking, and actually challenges it — so much so that representing him as a chef and only a chef would discount the character’s complexities.

“How do you put people in touch with characters that delight them every day, and tell really different stories?” Antonisse wondered out loud. “It’s a good prompt. It gets you to stretch and think about stories beyond the screen and beyond what you’re doing.”

Cozy Grove: Camp Spirit certainly isn’t 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 way more of a joy than a grind. But where other cozy games want to offer players a place to escape, Camp Spirit seems to want to equip players with empathy, listening skills, and complexities they might get to (or have to) employ in their real lives.

Further, it strikes a wonderful balance that acknowledges the world we live in without becoming, as Antonisse puts it, “a Saturday Night Live sketch.” There’s the description for spice, a crafting item, which reads “Why is it spicy?” in reference to the viral TikTok. Or the bit of dialogue that pokes fun at Spry Fox’s new owner, Netflix.

There are countless moments that’ll likely go unnoticed by a lot of players, but for Spry Fox and Antonisse, that’s part of the joy. They don’t know what percentage of players will get its social media references, or connect with Kumari’s business decisions, or appreciate the origami swans littered around the island. But it doesn’t matter if every player sees every moment, because some details are as much about the team that made it, and the moment they made it in, as they are about who plays the game.

“I think you see the challenges between communities and creators and expectations,” Antonisse said about the industry at large. “They have ever-growing expectations on sometimes very small teams to make more and more elaborate games to keep up with what they’re seeing [from players]. That desire to be seen is a desire to reduce the space between community expectations and what is possible to deliver as a small studio.”