Every step our group takes on the beach causes a tiny squeak, as if we are walking in clown shoes. We find a spot on top of a small dune and sit as the sun starts to duck low on the horizon.
Near me, a game designer is holding a giant orb above his head. He turns it on – kdonk! – and illuminates the avatars of three other members of House House, the Australian studio behind Untitled Goose Game (2019), where you annoy a quaint English village as a sassy waterfowl.
My interview with Nico Disseldorp, Stuart Gillespie-Cook, Jake Strasser and Kalonica Quigley is unfolding inside Big Walk, the studio’s follow-up to that mammoth success. Our avatars are bulbous bodies stacked like wobbly cairns, spindle-thin arms pointing and gesturing. When we speak, the protrusions on our heads swell and deflate.
Big Walk’s premise is not complicated to describe. This is a video game about walking around. It is not a game you play solo. It requires two, or up to 12, friends. What its name does not convey is where the magic lies: Big Walk is about the boundless ways we connect and play with one another.
Dotted around its lush love letter to the Australian environment are giant blocky structures, in bright colors, that contain puzzles. Each is cleverly devised around the game’s proximity chat, which allows you to hear other players only when they are close by.
Many puzzles erect barriers to communication, such as soundproof glass or the need to interact across vast distances. Solving them requires players to concoct new methods of delivering information without speech, developing their own language in the process.
Each puzzle you complete rewards your group with a butternut-squash-shaped item – some players call them “gourds,” while others have named them “peanuts,” “babies,” “heads” or “Kongs,” after the dog toy. As a walk progresses, the gourds unlock new areas and more puzzles. But these elements, the video game aspects, are not forced on you. They melt away as soon as you set foot into the world that House House has built. This is a playground wrapped in a reverie, not an obstacle course or a checklist.
Our bright and unusual avatars contrast with the landscape beyond the beach. The world of Big Walk – modelled superbly on Wilsons Promontory, a scenic peninsula that juts out of Australia’s southern coast – is inviting and warm. It is authentic in ways that anyone who has walked through the Australian bush immediately understands. Quigley’s flora sings, wattles gleam, ferns curl and eucalypts lurch. Strasser’s granite boulders feel as if they have been waiting for someone to tread upon them for eons.
House House’s oeuvre has been cartoonish animation, complemented by exceptionally tight gameplay and a hearty dose of humor. The tight gameplay and humor remain, but after Untitled Goose Game, and the freedom its success afforded, the team wanted to push itself beyond animation.
“We wanted to pick something that was going to provoke us to learn a heap of new skills,” Disseldorp said. “So we went for something with networking, and this kind of ‘complicated’ video game realism.”
Big Walk, which was released on Mac, PC, PlayStation 5 and Switch 2 last month, was moulded by the team’s online experiences with friends during the coronavirus pandemic. A group would get on Discord every Sunday night and play video games together. “It was providing something that nothing else in our lives was providing at that point in time,” Disseldorp said.
House House and friends journeyed through myriad multiplayer games during the lowest lows of lockdowns, starting with survival games such as Raft and Valheim before moving onto Roblox, the platform that allows players to build their own games. “There are some really interesting, strange experiences that you wouldn’t usually get in a commercial video game,” Strasser said of Roblox.
Two Roblox games were particularly influential: Somewhere, Wales, where players drive trains across a huge open world, and Theme Park Tycoon 2, where players build amusement parks together. A screenshot of the Theme Park game, shared by Marie Foulston, a member of the Discord group, shows an area that was known as the “Shape Zone” and built by Michael McMaster, the fifth member of House House. Primary colored cubes and spheres tower over the blocky players. The Big Walk DNA is there.
During the game’s six-year development, multiplayer games featuring proximity chat – such as Lethal Company, R.E.P.O. and Peak – exploded in popularity. House House had some concern that players might grow tired of the genre, but it may instead have helped to prime audiences. “We’re lucky that those games meant people went out and got headsets and got used to playing in groups,” Strasser said.
What complements the sense of place and freedom in Big Walk is the stunning sound design. Em Halberstadt, of the Vancouver studio A Shell in the Pit, spent days in Wilsons Promontory collecting insect stridulation, kookaburra chortles and the soul-replenishing background wildlife chatter that underpins every visit to the game’s island. The squeaking underfoot at the beach was Halberstadt’s doing, and a video of her punching the quartz sand spread widely.
Sitting on the game’s beach, Disseldorp explained the importance of play-testing. “It was, kind of deliberately, very loosely designed,” he said of Big Walk. “It was kind of improvised in response to the way people were playing when we’d watch them play.”
Goldie Bartlett, a game maker from Melbourne who is part of the Discord group, suggested this was something of a secret formula for House House. “They’re all very observational guys, and I think Kalonica is one of the most observant people I’ve ever met, particularly in understanding how people like to interact,” she said.
But even Quigley has been surprised by how players have inhabited the world. She recalled watching a friend who was walking with three strangers. The group found some deck chairs, set them up in a row and sat down.
“One of them got up and started singing opera,” she said. “It was just so beautiful and so unexpected and so special. It felt like a real gift.” – ©2026 The New York Times Company
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
