Indie gameValley of Shadowmixes elements of fantasy, therapy, and puzzles to create a new autobiographical gameplay experience. It follows the story of Anthony Vaccaro, co-creator and Synersteel Studio developer, who goes to therapy and grieves the loss of his father. Players will encounter real therapeutic processes that Anthony once underwent with the goal of healing from the trauma.
Anthony spoke with Game Rant about how closely “intertwined"Valley of Shadowis with his therapy experience, players' desire for “human connection,” and how the independent game offers just that.The following transcript has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Q: As a refresher for our readers, can you tell us a bit about yourself and alsoValley of Shadow?
Vaccaro:I am a lead narrative designer and lead artist for Synersteel Studio. It’s a little independent video game development company that my brother and I co-run. I’ve been working on video games for about 12 years now. Didn’t go to school for it, neither did my brother, but we are self-taught, just like most people who want to make video games and just either go to school or attempt to find a way to do it. I’ve been doing that for a while.
Valley of Shadowis a true story of my personal experiencegrieving the loss of my father. It’s what I call an artist’s rendition of cognitive behavioral therapy. Basically, the therapy that I had to go through to dig up my past and better understand myself following the death of my father.
Q: What made you want to make a video game out of that?
Vaccaro:I’ve been thinking about this for a couple of days in preparation for speaking to you about it because that question does come up a lot. I think that it has to do with aging. I’m 39, so I’m going to be 40 in a couple of months. I think that the medium of video games is maturing alongside the aging demographics that are now in our 40s, 50s, some of us are in our 60s, and there are really not a lot of autobiographical games. They are increasing over the past couple of years, but there haven’t really been a lot of games that have been maturing alongside us. So I think that part of it was me wanting somewhere to put my pain and my feelings.
I just opened up a new project one day and was like, “I have got to get this somewhere.” The other side was that it’s like, “I’m just not seeing this anywhere.” There’s no one to talk to me about this in the game space. There are some of the inspirations for it, likeGone Home, which was like a walking simulator.
It was a game, but a genre of “walking simulator.” And it’s like, “Oh, this is making me feel some kind of way.” Maybe [Valley of Shadow] could kind of be that, but deeper and more personal like, “Hey, this has been my experience. How do you feel about it?” Like, as the player? I think it was reaching out into space that didn’t really have anywhere for me to reach out to. Like, I was just reaching into the dark for help
Q: In your last interview with us, you mentioned that because of the game you are kind of constantly reliving through the trauma and the grief. How have those emotions changed or evolved, or have they kind of been the same?
Vaccaro:That’s a really good question. It’s interesting because once you’ve been through something, it’s like you’ll mature to a certain part of your life and heal from a certain trauma and be like, “Oh, you know, I’m feeling better.” But for me personally, there’s always that part. I am healed. I have a loving family and so on, but what I’m writing forValley of Shadow, if I allow myself to go back in my own mind, it all makes sense to me again. It’s a pretty dangerous scenario because like, “Oh no, this makes sense.”
Like, “Oh, I remember this darkness, I remember this darkness well, and I’m right back there again.” I think it’s a constant pulling myself to the present and reminding myself like where I am when I write on the script. For instance, I attempt to make sure I’m in a beautiful cafe surrounded by plants because you’re getting in that zone. My family helps me out a lot. I guess to answer your question, that’s how I’ve matured from it. It also gives me a lot of compassion for people who are still in it, and that helps me understand whatValley of Shadow’s message is. It’s like, this is for somebody that might not even realize you’re going through something while you’re playing it, but you start resonating with certain things, it’s like, “Oh my God, maybe this reminds me of my dad, or this reminds me of my mom.”
It’s not necessarily is there something wrong with me, but like, why am I resonating with this message? I think that is what this journey for myself has become. At first, it was, “I need to get the pain out somewhere,” but then over the process of development and going to conventions and speaking with players that are playing it, it’s become “What kind of responsibility do I have to the people that are playing my story?” I also just want to add here that Nicholas, my brother, is 50% of the game. He does all the coding, allthe puzzle design. He just always likes to decline being interviewed because he always wants me to tell that this is my story in particular and the way that I process my grief.
Q: How’s Valleyof Shadow’sdevelopment going?
Vaccaro:We are nearing beta so we’re hoping to have beta out by the end of this year. It is in development. It’s been in development for six years [laugh] and it’s been very non-traditional. Independent game developers, we all are trying to kind of figure it out. If you’re not like in a massive hierarchical corporate structure likeElectronic Artsor Ubisoft, we’re all kind of just winging it. It’s been in development for six years, and honestly, I didn’t even go into therapy until I was like four years into development. So part of the development process has also been the healing process.
We’re hoping to release it by mid-next year. We want a beta out by the end of this year, if possible, and released by mid-next year tentatively. But we’re very close to the end now.
Q: In your last interview with us, you spoke about spellcasting and the other mechanics that are in the game. Have there been any other major changes – without giving too much away?
Vaccaro:A little, not mechanics-wise, the mechanics are all still the same, but what the mechanics mean and how they fully integrate with the story itself. Every spell is not an emotion, but it represents a person, so to speak.
I’ll give a little bit away. The puzzles that those attach to integrate differently with the end of the game. One thing that is really exciting about the writing of it, and howthe writing and the narrative integrate with the game mechanics, is that about 60% or 70% through the game, the paradigm of the game changes. So you are experiencing a puzzle scenario. You’re experiencing my therapeutic process through my childhood and those various traumas that occurred and going past them, but then you also experience part of my early adulthood and what that was like to go into early adulthood, not knowing that I was carrying this baggage and this pain. And that is when the paradigm shifts, you’re still casting spells, but you’re doing it in a different way and in different scenarios. That’s been really exciting.
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But the interesting thing is we’re not writing the story or developing a game in a typical three-act structure or something that is more kind of mainstream. It’s like really almost like David Lynch, where it’s just different. A lot of the things that I want to incorporate story-wise, like the way that we introduce photographs to you and the story and the fact that you’re even going through a therapy process, throws the player completely off balance because the player’s not used to playing a game like this. We’re not used to receiving human stories like this. Like some of it’s disjointed, like some of it you’ll be confronted with questions as a player, and I’m just not going to answer them for you.
A lot of questions in life are just not answered, but at the same time, being thrown off balance is the same thing that makes it memorable to the players. People will be asking me questions about family members that I have after playing that they see in a photo … because of the way that we present it, it’s just like here is a raw experience and I don’t know how you’re going to take it as a player, but this is how I experienced it in my life. It’s the genuineness of that I think really is a glue that makes it really intriguing and really powerful.
Q: So we’re talking about the whole development process. Is there anything that you wish you had done differently so far?
Vaccaro:That is a great question. It is such a delicate edifice, but also a brute-force process that it’s almost like doing anything different would have changed it completely. Honestly, I wish I would’ve gone to therapy earlier. How’s that? I would’ve gone to therapy a lot earlier [laugh] and that would’ve probably changed the course of the game, but it would’ve changed the course of my life and some of the relationships that I had that I kind of ruined because of the pain that I was experiencing. I think that the game’s development process is so carefully intertwined with my own life experience that I would’ve gone to therapy probably two years sooner than when I went to it, which would’ve hastened the development process a bit mechanically. We went for like a year or two not even knowing what the story was going to be.
Question: Just to clarify a little more on the timeline. How old were you when your father passed away?
Vaccaro:32.
Q: And then just in terms of therapy did you go on your own accord or did people suggest it to you?
Vaccaro:People did suggest it to me for a couple of years. I don’t want to say I ignored it. The actions of me not doing it were I ignored it, but I kept taking it in because I was terrified of it. And a lot of people, of course, are scared. I learned later from my therapist actually during one of the sessions that it’s almost like an inside assertion that they have. Anytime they get a white man for the first time, like speaking specifically in cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), we’re usually at the end of our rope because we wait until the very last second, which was my experience.
I don’t want to give too much of it away because that is actually ascene in the game when I went into therapy, but I did not heed the voices of, frankly, all the women who were close to me in my life were essentially eventually begging me to go.
I have a lot of respect for that and a lot of compassion for that – that’s a whole different conversation topic [laugh], but that’s what it was. Yeah. I was asked to go, I was like, “No, I can do this.” And then internally, I was terrified of it because my entire identity was wrapped up in my pain. That’s what a lot of people can go through is we just wrap ourselves up in our pain, and we think that that’s all this life is. That was my experience. It was whenever I was at the end of my rope that I finally made that call, and it changed the entire course of my life andValley of Shadow, thankfully.
It took me a while to really appreciate that. Yeah. I was like a year into therapy. I did it for a year. It was really powerful for me, very transformative, and I had a lot of work to do even after it. But that is when I realized it was a bit after that when I was like, I think this is what the story for the game needs to be. The narrative needs to be, “you may do this too.” Like as a player, you’re just playing a game, you’re having a good time. It’s a video game, it’s all entertainment.
But at the same time, I feel like I had a responsibility–and so did Nick, my brother, and so did my sister Maria, who plays the voice of the therapist actually, so it’s a trifecta–to bring it back to the player and show you that you could probably benefit from something like this. You might be feeling things, but you don’t even know what they are. So you might be where I was. You might be experiencing something as a player that I wish I would’ve experienced so that I could’ve gone there earlier.
Question: So we can shift more toValley of Shadow. But again, thank you so much for sharing all of that. The music in the game sounds kind of eerie, but also still magical and mysterious. It almost reminds me ofHarry Potter,is that like the mood that you were going for, and if so, how does that add to the gameplay experience?
Vaccaro:Yeah, that is the mood. That music is the original music. We did not have a composer; that is carry-over music from pre-production when I was basically just slapping paint on a canvas [laugh]. I was just going through music, and I purchased that from a composer called WOW Sound years ago. We got the license for all those tracks, and they were exactly how I was feeling. I put purple rain on there. I put a mountain in the back, and I just felt everything was cold. I just felt it’s basically like depression and anxiety in video game form and that includes the music. It’s very melancholic, very pretty, but also, like, there’s something beyond that veil there–keep going. I wanted it to utilize some of the feelings– likehorror experiencesutilize–like the unknown… it is magical, but it feels a little dangerous, like ‘Do you want to go in the woods right now?’ [Laugh]. And that’s what I wanted to utilize. I just was scouring for music and sound effects, I found that, and we put it together in that way.
Question: You’re blending fantasy qualities with heavy real-life incidents and topics. Were there any difficulties trying to blend those two together?
Vaccaro:No, not really. I mean, because our experiences in our culture, like American culture is really just like mainstream, like media culture and all the video games we played as kids and movies we watched and shows, it really set us up to already imagine these things as this kind of experience. It was like there was too much of it. I felt like I wanted to be in a cemetery [laugh] at the same time I’m in a castle, and I’m also in my childhood home. The hard part was whittling it down over time and trying to connect that with the ultimate message of the game. I consider our work to be like a sculptor’s experience.
You start from a giant block of marble or granite, and you’re just whittling it down and cutting out all the pieces that don’t fit. We just have so much in the realms of fantasy tropes – imagery, aesthetics, and some sci-fi. There’s going to be some sci-fi in there. We just have so much material, so it’s like, “Okay, what doesn’t fit?” That was the hardest part– just finding out a couple of years in “Ah, we can get rid of this. We can stop thinking about this. This is just burning energy. Let me get rid of all these statues. Let me put this in instead. This makes more sense.”
Q: Light and dark is kind of a theme, in terms of just visually and just trauma versus healing, can you talk about the connection between the use of magic and spell casting and thenValley of Shadow’s journey to healing?
Vaccaro:That’s a great question. Theuse of magicbegan as part of a trope. We wanted to utilize a fantasy trope, and we kind of wanted to tie in the story with mechanics because, in the beginning, we were like, well, this is a video game. People need to be interacting with it in some way.
Over time, it evolved into the staff that you’re using–I don’t want to give it away too much–it is a big part of the story later, but the staff that you’re utilizing took me back to a safe space. Like we’re just playing a game just like I did when we were kids and I heard my parents arguing a couple of rooms over. Like, “I’m just playing a game. I’m just going to get lost in video game stuff. Get lost in magic.”
“I’m just going to get lost inSuper Nintendo andEarthBound, andit just really ended up fitting” – a lot of it was very serendipitous. This stuff is already inside of us just growing up in the culture that we’ve grown up in and it became a scaffolding for the pain that I feel as a human being.
It was like this stuff was already just there, primed by that stuff. I mean,magic spells, you know, playingDungeons and Dragons…like leaving the house and going to a friend’s place at night and just playingDungeons and Dragons…just getting lost in the magic of it. That turned intoValley of Shadow.
Going through thepuzzle roomswith these spells is holding tightly to something that is warm in all of this cold. You’ll hear it with that reference in the voiceovers a lot, like back and forth. The call and response with the therapist with Emma is you know, ‘It’s so cold here. It’s so cold.’ Emma will say, ‘Find something that’s warm.’ And I say, ‘The staff is warm.’ And she says, ‘That’s good.’ It’s holding onto this thing that I feel that I need while going through the work of processing the trauma, which are the puzzles.
Then that evolves into something else in the later act in the game. I don’t want to give that away cause it’s so juicy [laugh], but that’s the connection of it. It began as a need for somewhere to put this pain.Video games have actions and mechanics, let’s use those. I actually, I’m even realizing this now in real time…that was me at the moment feeling that pain as a 35 to 37-year-old. I’m just going to get lost in magic again. Yeah. Hey, it’s working. It’s working. I’m alive. I’m still alive another day.
Q: I believe you kind of touched on this on how there are not a lot of games that do whatValley of Shadowwill do once it gets released. Do you seeValley of Shadowhaving any advantages for being an autobiographical title?
Vaccaro:Yes. The main one is that nobody wants to do this, and I completely understand. I resonate with it strongly. It’s extremely difficult, and I would not be able to do it without the close family relationships I have. I could not do it without my brother and my sister – both of which are integral parts of the story itself, like the story and the technical work of the game. I think that marketing-wise, when we realized that a couple of years ago, it was like, “Oh, we have to do this. Like this is the number one marketing pitch.” This is a very deep and dark personal story, and it is as true as we can make it.
Like, good luck finding this. Other people do it, and after taking Valley of ShadowIto conventions, people have been like, “How can I do what you’re doing?” I would sit with them after they played the demo for an hour, and I talk with ‘em for another three hours about their owntraumain their own life. Some people will want to do it, but the selling point of it is you’re going to be really hard-pressed to find somebody that does this.
LikeThat Dragon, Cancercame out almost 10 years ago and that was about a husband and wife, a true story, losing their toddler to cancer. They do exist, but these stories are very few and far between because they’re so painful to tell. Not only are they painful to tell, but they’re painful to tell in a way that you won’t get bored while experiencing it. They have to be entertaining too, in some way.
To the Moonis a huge inspiration. I think I cried for like an hour after playing that game [laugh]. I think it’s the two sides of the same coin, and that’s what makes it so advantageous is that very few people want to do it. Honestly, right now, including myself, it’s hard to get through it [laugh].
Q: Is there anything that we didn’t talk about that you’d like to discuss or bring up?
Vaccaro:Oh my God, so much [laugh]. I mean, that’s the thing aboutValley of Shadowis it’s so all-encompassing… it’s turned into this thing where I love to connect with the people that experience it. What did you go through? What have you gone through? We didn’t realize it was going to be so connected to people.
Something to touch on was the fear for the first two years of development before we took it to any conventions. We went toAwesome Conin 2019 for the first time and that was the first time anybody played it – aside from one of our girlfriends basically, and Maria our sister – and like, we thought that nobody would get it. It was before the story. That was even before I went to therapy. It was just the visuals, the music. I had some of my voice in there, some voiceovers, which were like me questioning where I am. Almost like being forced into a meditative process. You’re kind of waking up from a dream. I was like, “Where am I? Why are there photos here?”
Before we went to the convention, we were like, nobody’s going to connect with this, it’s too artsy, so let’s put in a bunch of like retro stuff, like someD&Dbooks,some Magic cards, some GI Joe, and we’ll just put in a bunch of posters to get people like talking about that. That’s what we thought that people would resonate with. But it was the opposite.
This older woman with her two kids, maybe 40 to 45, and her kids were playing, she’s watching over their shoulders. She and I were talking, and she said, “This is like a really dark game.” We’re talking about the theme of the game. And she said, “No, I understand. I understand. Like the staff is the light that you carry through the dark time,” and I was like, “Yeah, that’s how it feels.” I’ll never forget this, she said, “That’s what I felt when I was going through my cancer treatments.”
And I was like, “holy, dude!” That’s when things began to click. That’s when I was like, “Oh my God, this can be done. This can be done. Yeah, we can do this,” and Nick felt the same way.
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We are as a culture, as a nation, as a global civilization, we are starving for human connection. Not just the human connection, but speaking about the deep stuff that we just are not allowed to talk about, you know, commercials don’t bring this up. Cheerios commercials don’t talk about the death of your father, you know what I mean? [laugh], historically video games don’t talk about this. They’re for kids, right? Well, what about the adults? What about us?
What about those of us who have now lost people? Those of us who have been through cancer, those of us who have maybe had longCovidnow, and who knows what kind of games are going to come out of that? But what about those of us that need to have somewhere to put this?
I think that’s the advantage. But that’s also why I think what’s really important about our medium is if this is art,if games are art, then the artist is responsible. The artists need you. We need to be responsible for the voices, for the things that we’re saying. So that’s all I wanna talk about [laugh].
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