The mandatory COVID lockdowns of 2020 inspired Big Walk. Melbourne-based developer House House – which was behind the 2019 hit Untitled Goose Game – wanted to create something that was about socialising outside with your friends at a time when this was impossible. But the devs had no idea it would take six years to complete.
“I couldn’t imagine starting something and going, ‘Okay, we’ll put six years into this.’ That’d be mad,” Nico Disseldorp, the co-designer and programmer of Big Walk, tells GamesIndustry.biz. “But to tell yourself it’s gonna be small – [that] allows you to kind of get the ball rolling.”
Stuart Gillespie-Cook, one-fourth of House House, agrees. “At first, it was like, maybe [it will take] a few months. Maybe it will be the same as Untitled Goose Game, which took three years. But then Big Walk kind of had a scope of its own. It felt like the right thing to do to explore it thoroughly.”
Six years is a long time, though. Was there ever any consideration of going through Early Access?
“Of all the games we’ve worked on, this would be the one to do that with,” says Gillespie-Cook, adding that he has nothing against the Early Access approach.
But Disseldorp thinks it wouldn’t have been the right move. “I think we always felt confident that we had a process. If we’d introduced an audience by going into Early Access, like two years ago, hypothetically, then all of a sudden that Early Access audience becomes a really important part of the process. We were a bit anxious that if we did [Early Access], that might kind of upset the process a little bit.”
“Big Walk is a relatively quiet game in some regards; there’s so much kind of downtime and empty space, and we didn’t want to have loud audience voices overwhelming the way we were thinking about it.”
Experimentation
Revealed in 2023 during The Game Awards, Big Walk is House House’s long-awaited follow-up to Untitled Goose Game – a stealth/comedy title which went from an inside joke to becoming a global hit, selling over 1 million copies three months after its release, and taking home DICE’s Game of the Year award to boot.
Like Untitled Goose Game, Big Walk emerged almost by accident. The project began as a virtual space in which the House House team could hang out and have meetings when doing so in person was out of the question.
“I remember thinking about how I’d been to a bunch of Zoom birthday parties, which were horrible: just like 40 people in one Zoom call and only one person could talk at the time,” Gillespie-Cook remembers. “So very early on, one of the very earliest pictures was like, ‘We’ll just put [in] proximity voice chat, and it’ll just be a space where we can meet with our friends’.”
After putting together Big Walk’s first prototype in around a week, House House knew they had something special. “Part of that was probably that it was lockdown, and we were missing each other a lot. So to have this little space where we could be together really meant a lot to us. But once we tapped into that feeling, we were like, ‘We need this game to be about this feeling.’ And we’ve been chasing that for six years.”
It took around two years of experimentation to understand what kind of game they were making. Big Walk’s abstract, genre-defying nature, however, didn’t stop Panic, the publisher of Untitled Goose Game, from backing another House House project. Panic agreed to fund the production just six months in.
“We sent them a one-page pitch,” Nico remembers. “We had a picture of the characters and a big hill. They were maybe looking through the binoculars. And were like, ‘It’s a game about hanging out.’ There wasn’t much to say at that point. We knew it had this feeling, but we couldn’t really put it into words.”
We concur. Having played Big Walk in a private session, it’s difficult to convey the game in words. In plain terms, it’s a first-person co-operative exploration game set in a virtual recreation of Wilson’s Promontory National Park, where you must use your wobbly limbs and proximity chat to solve a range of puzzles – or wander off only to realise you’re speaking to yourself the whole time, as happened to this author.
“We sent them a one-page pitch. We had a picture of the characters and a big hill”
But that description doesn’t do Big Walk justice – something of which the team at House House is all too aware.”It’s a funny thing. The things that I know are really good, [the] really fun parts – it sounds so flat when you describe them to someone,” says Gillespie-Cook.
“You can talk to each other and then sometimes you can’t talk to each other. And I know that’s really exciting in [Big Walk] and leads to all these interesting situations where you have to mime or use a whiteboard to talk. It’s really cool to do that in a video game, but it sounds so boring when you say it out loud.”
Friendslop
Big Walk is launching at a time when co-op multiplayer is very much in vogue. Peak from Aggro Crab and Landfall became a surprise hit in 2025, with Video Game Insights estimating the game has sold more than 18 million units to date. And Peak is just one of a number of so-called friendslop titles that have sold millions, including Lethal Company, RV There Yet?, and REPO.
Disseldorp and Gillespie-Cook find the rapid rise of friendslop (a term they aren’t keen on) both worrying and reassuring. “I definitely remember really clearly when Lethal Company came out [in 2023] to being like, ‘Oh, wow. This is a little bit scary’,” Gillespie-Cook admits. “Previously, we’d been making something there wasn’t a name for, as far as we knew.”
Gillespie-Cook continues: “[But] it was also like: ‘People do want to play these types of games! People do have the kind of social energy to get their friends together, and wrangle them into a group call, and organize to play games like this. By the time Peak came out, we were like, ‘Yeah, this is a real thing’.”
“Previously, we’d been making something there wasn’t a name for”
The House House members admit the instant success of Peak (which they say they’ve not played yet) eased any fears that they might have had about missing the boat. But they’re also aware that, inevitably, comparisons will be drawn between Landfall’s game and their own, since both are first-person multiplayer games built around proximity chat and physical movement. Disseldorp isn’t too concerned, however.
“I remember being worried about themes of this game being too similar. But Big Walk is a long-form open-world adventure game, which I don’t think any of these other games really are,” he reasons. “I think our game is still kind of going to be a unique take on what it means to have a proximity chat-focused game.”
Problem chat
One of the notable uses of Big Walk’s proximity chat – beyond the casual banter – is a relay-style puzzle, as described by Disseldorp.
One player in possession of a code has to relay it to another player through a window that reduces their voice to a hushed whisper, then the listener runs across to pass the code to the next person, and so on. While such challenges have the desired (comedic) effect with larger groups, making a puzzle intended for a specific number of people presented problems.
“When we’d design a challenge, there would always be an initial version we’d come up with, and it’d be like, ‘Oh, this one needs four people; this one needs two people.’ And for a while, we’re like, ‘Maybe we’ll put a sign out front that says, ‘Three people needed. If you’ve got only two: go away!’,” Disseldorp explains with a chuckle.
House House’s solution to the problem was having three “modes” available – two-player, three-player, and four-or-more – with subtle adjustments to puzzles to accommodate different group sizes.
“That moment Nico was talking about when we first decided we needed to put in variants and try to limit it for different groups of players – I remember feeling very daunted,” Gillespie-Cook admits. “But the second we started, it turned out to be a very fun and interesting problem to solve. How do we maintain this feeling, but for a different group [size]?”
House House ended up finding most of their solutions through hours of playtesting footage (around 200 hours, by Disseldorp’s estimate).
As long as it takes
It’s been almost seven years since Untitled Goose Game put House House on the map, but the game’s overwhelming success hasn’t altered the studio’s approach. They’re still a tiny team, says Disseldorp, making “look at my character doing this” type of games inspired by Mario 64 – a classic both developers consider the Holy Grail of physical interactive comedy.
The most notable change is that they can now afford to tinker away for years on end.
“We would’ve had to be much smarter about our scope if it had been like, ‘Okay, we’ve got X years of money to work with, we need to get the next thing out.’ So we’ve been very lucky to have been able to be open-ended and kind of like fickle in that way.”
Big Walk launches on Switch 2, PlayStation 5, PC, and Mac on August 4, and approaching the finish line after all these years comes with a mix of emotions.
For Disseldorp, it’s a mixture of being proud of all the work they’ve put in and trying to keep expectations low (“You can’t expect the lightning to hit twice,” he reasons). Gillespie-Cook, meanwhile, doesn’t shy away from admitting to a degree of apprehension.
“I definitely feel terrified. Just the fact that it’s been so long means you want the investment to have been worth it. But in a way, it has kind of paid off already. I do feel like I have got what I wanted out of making this thing.”
“Separately, I really do hope that everyone else likes Big Walk as well, and we weren’t just getting tricked by our nice friends.”
