When I arrive to meet with the tiny team at Melbourne game developer House House, they’re sitting in a circle under a eucalyptus tree. After introductions, the five of us set off into the scrub. Over the course of our hike we take a train to the beach, huddle on deck chairs in the sand dunes and climb a mountain as the sun rises. All without ever leaving our desks.
Welcome to the world of Big Walk: House House’s new game after the runaway global success Untitled Goose Game, which saw millions fall in love with being a naughty goose rampaging through a bucolic village. After Untitled Goose Game’s overwhelming success, House House wanted their next game to be very different and “unusual”. Despite this, Big Walk has been an immediate success, with more than 1m downloads in the first week of release.
In Big Walk, your only goal is to go on a walk through sprawling bushland, solving puzzles with friends. At the centre of the game’s design is a proximity voice chat, which means you can talk clearly to someone who is right beside you but can’t hear each other when you’re separated.
As we board the puttering train that winds across the game’s map, the House House team tells me how Big Walk began: during Covid lockdowns, when they started playing games online with international friends. This group was the first to test a very early version of Big Walk.
“One of the first things we did was just go on a walk, from one side of this map to the other,” says Nico Disseldorp, who describes his niche within the team as “capital G game design”. “And it had this really interesting feeling of wanting to pay attention to each other, to look out for each other, make sure no one got left behind.”
A turning point for House House came when sound designer Em Halberstadt suggested they bring on audio programmer Nicholas Zhang. The two had a “level of ambition” that became integral to the game; while telling me about this, the train we’re on goes through a tunnel and our voices change, echoing in the confined space.
Beyond the chunky stick figure characters, the world of Big Walk is remarkably realistic. Although they initially considered the Faroe Islands in the North Atlantic as a setting, they were drawn closer to home – specifically Wilsons Promontory, a few hours south of Melbourne. “Because of its geography, it has that kind of isolated video game level feeling that we needed,” says Jake Strasser, who worked alongside Kalonica Quigley to design the game’s intricate landscape. “And it’s just so beautiful and has all this magical, rich source material to it.”
The team spent time on Wilsons Promontory during development, staying in a cabin at Tidal River. They would brainstorm in the mornings and go on walks in the afternoon. Strasser and Quigley took reference photos of plants and the sound team flew out to do field recordings.
Jumping off the train, we head to a secluded spot by a beach. We collect deckchairs from the surrounding bush and arrange them in a circle. The sun has set but we have a glowing orb to light the way – when the sun sets in Big Walk it is properly dark.
“It seems like a tough ask for a video game audience,” animator Stuart Gillespie-Cook says of the darkness, “That sometimes it’s going to be a bit slow and sad.”
The team realised they needed something “to guide you through and give you a reason to go on these walks”: these are puzzles, the kind “you might play if you go camping when you don’t have much equipment, that are just about communicating with each other”, Disseldorp says.
The puzzles, dotted in neon buildings across the map, force you to think about communication. Often the ability to talk is removed, so you have to find another way through. Your reward for finishing each one is a red bulbous object. I’ve seen these referred to as peanuts or gourds. My friend group calls them babies.
When I ask the team what their official name is, they won’t answer.
“This interview is over!” Strasser jokes, running off.
Disseldorp’s answer is more diplomatic: “We have our own words for what they’re called, but it’s no more or less important than what any other group calls them. So much of the game is about creating your own lexicon for the world.”
Given how intimate the game’s development process was, it makes sense that Big Walk’s release was nerve-racking for the team.
“A month before the game came out, I had the feeling like ‘this is our private little space that we’ve built for ourselves’, and we’ve been playing in it for six years,” Disseldorp says, “And I don’t want to let a bunch of strangers in. They’ll get their muddy feet all over the carpet.”
This worry didn’t last long. Since its release, reception to Big Walk has been overwhelmingly positive. There is a relief that people “get it”.
“Some of the stories we’ve heard are punch-in-the-gut beautiful,” Strasser says. “I’ve cried over emails of brothers feeling connected with each other in a new way; cousins who’ve never met reaching out across a family feud; people who just experienced massive loss playing together and finding joy.”
We leave the deck chairs to walk along the beach. Strasser and Gillespie-Cook wander off ahead as Disseldorp and Quigley recall a time when Quigley and a small group played through an early version of the game.
“We felt like we owed you an ending that didn’t really exist,” Disseldorp says, more to Quigley than me. “And then the [group] that had been playing just swam into the [ocean], as deep as you could, and we could hear bits of laughter at a distance, and we were watching, very happy that you’d enjoyed the game and you were enjoying saying goodbye. And then each of you disconnected one by one in the water and that was it. You didn’t come back and say goodbye. And it felt like such a momentous finish that was in such a stark contrast to how I normally associate winding up playing a video game.”
“I think that’s my biggest feeling at the moment,” Quigley adds as we begin climbing a mountain to watch the sun rise. “I have memories like that that I really cherish. And I think of them like memories of hanging out with my friends in real life.”
