Big Walk, the cooperative game from House House, the Melbourne studio behind Untitled Goose Game, sold more than 1 million copies in its first week and passed 2 million by September 25. Three months after its August 4 launch, searches for it are climbing again in the US and Canada, and the hook is simple: you and up to 11 friends go for a very long walk and try not to lose each other.
The studio’s own fact sheet calls it “a cooperative online walker-talker.” Groups of 2 to 12 players set out across a wide open world full of puzzles, and the whole design leans on talking. Voices fade with distance, echo down tunnels, go muffled behind walls and crackle through walkie-talkies, so a friend who wanders off the trail simply stops being audible.
How you play when you can’t hear each other
That short hearing range is the point. When speech fails, players fall back on a kit the studio lists as walkie-talkies, laser pointers, binoculars, megaphones, flares, whiteboards, cowbells and “a big golden head.” Characters can point, wave and flail their arms. Many puzzles deliberately take speech away, pushing groups into miming, singing or tapping out codes.
Solving a puzzle earns a lumpy, unnamed object shaped a bit like a butternut squash, red for easier puzzles and purple for harder ones. Collecting enough of them opens up a map room, a train and a ski lift across half the world. There are two endings, one behind a giant wall and a second that needs every puzzle done. The studio stresses that this is a game with a finish line, built to be played start to end with the same group.
A real Australian park, shrunk down
The world is a loose 1:20 scale model of Wilsons Promontory, a coastal national park in Victoria, in southeastern Australia. The team camped at Tidal River, scanned the land with lidar and placed 80 to 100 models of plants native to the area. Sound designers recorded kookaburras and the squeaking quartz sand of Squeaky Beach; every character sound was made with a rubber dog toy, and the reward objects with a real butternut squash.
Six years from lockdown prototype to launch
- 2019: Untitled Goose Game is a hit and gives the studio room to experiment.
- 2020 to 2021: During pandemic lockdowns the team builds a proximity-chat prototype in about a week, wanting a place to hang out online.
- December 2023: Big Walk is announced with its first trailer.
- June 7, 2025: A gameplay trailer arrives.
- August 4, 2026: Release on Windows and Mac through Steam, the Mac App Store, PlayStation 5 and Nintendo Switch 2, with crossplay, published with Panic.
Co-founder Nico Disseldorp has said the team first guessed development would take up to three years, adding: “if someone had appeared and told us it’d take six years, we would’ve pulled the plug”.
What players get
Big Walk is rated E for Everyone in the US, and accessibility options include text chat and the ability to skip a puzzle outright. After launch, players complained that voices were too quiet even up close; the studio said on August 8 it had fixed the problem, which it traced to quiet microphone setups, while keeping the short hearing distance. The game picked up six Golden Joystick Award nominations, including Ultimate Game of the Year and Best Multiplayer Game.
For more on games built around odd ideas, see our look at Find The Needle, the haystack game with six million strands, and Soulframe’s open pre-alpha on PC.
Further reading
Image: Dietmar Rabich, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons
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