Big Walk Review - The Goose Devs Made Me Love My Friends Again

I was ready to roll my eyes at Big Walk. Another cozy co-op game about vibes and friendship, the kind the internet has taken to calling friendslop? Then I spent two evenings hiking across its world with three friends and a set of walkie-talkies, and I have not laughed this hard at a game in years.

What it is

Big Walk is the new cooperative adventure from House House, the Australian studio behind Untitled Goose Game, published by Panic. It launched on August 4, 2026 for PC and Mac via Steam, PlayStation 5 and Nintendo Switch 2, with full cross-play, for $19.99 - and there is a 25% launch discount running until August 18. It is online multiplayer only, built for groups of 2 to 12, and designed to be played start to finish with the same crew.

How it plays

You walk. That is genuinely the core verb - your little long-legged creature hikes across a big, hand-crafted open world of coastal cliffs, trails and odd contraptions. The magic is in how you talk. The proximity voice chat is the real star tech here: voices fade with distance, echo through corridors, muffle behind walls and crackle over walkie-talkies. Every puzzle is built on top of that. One of you reads symbols off a whiteboard while another, half a valley away, tries to reproduce them; someone waves a laser pointer; someone yells into a megaphone and ruins everything. When speech is not an option, you flail your arms in gestures that are somehow both useless and perfectly understandable.

Nothing here is mechanically difficult. Everything is socially chaotic, and that is the point. House House understands that the fun of co-op is not the solution but the negotiation - the same insight that made a horrible goose a global star, now stretched across a whole landscape.

The lows

Be very clear about what you are buying. There is no single-player, no story to grind through alone: if you cannot get at least one friend online at the same time, Big Walk is a screensaver. Herding a bigger group has the usual scheduling pain, and once your crew has solved the world, the pull to walk it again drops off. I also occasionally wished the puzzles pushed harder - a few sections coast on charm.

Who it's for

If you have a Discord group that survived the co-op horror wave, this is your next obsession, and at launch-sale pricing it costs less per person than a round of drinks. If you play alone, this is - for once literally - not for you.

Verdict: the warmest, funniest multiplayer design of the year, a game that turns talking into gameplay and strangers' laughter into its soundtrack. It only stumbles where real life does: you need people.

Score: 9/10

Image: Dietmar Rabich / CC BY-SA 4.0, source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Princetown_(AU),_Port_Campbell_National_Park,_Twelve_Apostles_--_2019_--_0930.jpg