By Kyle Holmquist

Whispering Willows is very much a historical fiction, considering the story of Wortham Willows (the game’s antagonist) is actually set in the mid-late 1800s. We took a huge amount of inspiration from the story of John Bidwell, an affluent pioneer from that same era who was known for leading one of the first emigrant parties along the California Trail.

John Bidwell founded the city of Chico, California, where a number of the development team attended college. The story of John Bidwell is a bit of a complicated one, as many accounts of his life are nothing but good deeds. But there are other parts of history that don’t shine such a nice light on the man. While he was a philanthropist and ended up donating a huge amount of his estate to the city of Chico, it’s thought that land perhaps didn’t really belong to him, and instead rightfully belonged to the native peoples he stole it from.

We used this awesome duality to help with the plot of Whispering Willows. Wortham Willows is known by most to be a good man and the founder of his town, but he has a dark past the player learns as they go through the game’s story. That duality also plays extremely well with the duality of our own main character, represented in her powers.

When developing Whispering Willows, we really wanted to make sure we weren’t glossing over the atrocities committed against native people and we certainly didn’t shy away from the realities of that in terms of the game’s themes and content. It’s important to be reminded of past errors and historical fiction is a wonderful lens to do that with.