House House just announced that Big Walk will be out on August 4 for PC/Mac on Steam, Switch 2, and PlayStation 5, with cross-play between all platforms.
The followup to Untitled Goose Game, the Melbourne-based team spent six years building an open world for you to explore with your friends, a virtual play space for 2-10 friends with cooperative challenges built around the constraints of its proximity-based voice chat.
This is, hands down, my most anticipated game of the year. I’ve followed its development for years through my friends at Panic, but have largely managed to avoid spoiling myself.
Like my own Skittish project, House House was inspired by the distance imposed by lockdowns in the early pandemic. Like I did with Skittish, House House felt that proximity chat could be a good way to bring people together in a more natural way online, when they couldn’t be together in person.
Big Walk plays with this idea in different ways, putting players in spaces where they can see but not hear each other, giving players megaphones and radios to communicate over great distances, or modifying their voices to make them quieter so they need to get super close to each other to hear.
Building a game around proximity chat for small groups of friends must have felt very risky when House House started development in 2020, but in the last two years, the rise of enormously popular “friendslop” games like Peak, Content Warning, R.E.P.O., RV There Yet?, YAPYAP, and Lethal Company have proven the idea works.
Big Walk is quieter than these games, focused on exploration and collaboration in a world inspired by a real place, Wilsons Promontory National Park.
I really struggled to demonstrate the magic of Skittish’s spatial voice chat during its short life, but House House and Panic are doing a brilliant job in their videos. I can’t wait to pull some friends together and try it for myself.
You can wishlist the game on Steam now, and read more in a new interview out today with House House’s Nico Disseldorp and Stuart Gillespie-Cook.
