Years after seemingly hanging up the cape and stepping away from games, Bruce Straley – best known for his work directing several Uncharted games, as well as The Last of Us – is back with a funky little game called Coven of the Chicken Foot. It focuses on reactive companion characters, and Straley’s own words, “It’s not something that you need to do a remaster of in the next four years because the tech has already outgrown it.”
Straley shared that sentiment with Polygon in an interview that spans his legacy at Naughty Dog, the reasons for his departure, and the work he’s been up to ever since. This comment seems particularly pointed considering Naughty Dog has spent the years since Straley left largely remastering or remaking much of its own work.
Moreover, the industry has – at large, it should be noted – adapted a more brazen attitude about revisiting and re-releasing its older work lately. The trend of remastering games, which began in earnest in the late aughts, seems to have seized the industry to the point where we’re often talking about remasters and remakes. Given the economic hardships that the games industry has been weathering the last several years, it’s also hardly surprising to see it leverage constantly advancing technology to revitalize storied and treasured IPs and series.
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For his part, Straley confessed that he wanted very little to do with that. He left Naughty Dog because he wanted to avoid falling into repetition after directing multiple installments in similar franchises and honing what would eventually become the studio’s signature style of action-adventure titles.
“I got paid very well there, I got some appreciation there, but it felt like it was time to break out and try it on my own. It felt like it was time to evolve my concepts and build a new team,” Straley shared.
The result of those experiments? Straley’s new remote studio, Wildflower Interactive – which comes in at a whopping 16 members, 12 of whom are devs – and Coven of the Chicken Foot, which looks positively charming at first blush. It centers on an older witch named Gertie (an unlikely platforming protag) who is aided by a curious sheep-like creature that observes and reacts to the player’s behaviors and actions.
The emphasis for Straley and his team this time around certainly doesn’t seem to be in courting (or redefining) the prestige work that he once accomplished at his older studio. In fact, he seems entirely content with shedding himself of that legacy and getting out from under its shadow, a kind of thinking that he dubs, “a fear-based mindset” that stifles creativity.
The Last of Us director left Naughty Dog after the studio settled into a “paradigm” of how to make a specific type of game: “I just don’t have it in me. I would make a lot more money if I did!”
