House House is a five-person studio in Melbourne that spent six years building a game where the only goal is to go on a walk. That sentence either hooks you immediately or it doesn't, and your reaction is probably a reliable predictor of whether Big Walk is for you. The game grew directly out of Covid lockdowns, when the team started playing online with international friends and noticed something: the pull to pay attention to each other, to look out for each other, to make sure no one got left behind. That observation became the design. Proximity voice chat sits at the centre — you can hear someone clearly when they're beside you, and lose them entirely when you separate. Distance is rendered acoustically. The world responds: a tunnel changes your voice to an echo, darkness falls properly at night, a glowing orb guides you through. The setting is Wilsons Promontory, a few hours south of Melbourne — chosen over the Faroe Islands because, as designer Jake Strasser puts it, its geography has 'that kind of isolated video game level feeling.' The team stayed at Tidal River during development, brainstorming in the mornings and walking in the afternoons. Sound designer Em Halberstadt and audio programmer Nicholas Zhang flew out for field recordings. The landscape is detailed enough that the chunky stick-figure characters feel less like an aesthetic choice and more like a deliberate counterweight — keeping the human figures loose so the world can breathe. Puzzles are dotted across the map in neon buildings. They're the camping-trip kind: low-equipment, communication-dependent, often stripping away the ability to talk so you have to find another way through. Your reward is a red bulbous object. The team refuses to name it officially. 'So much of the game is about creating your own lexicon for the world,' Disseldorp says — and he means it. The unnamed object is a design decision, not an oversight. The emotional stories coming back from players are the kind that validate the whole project: brothers reconnecting, cousins who'd never met finding each other across a family feud, people navigating grief together. One early playtest group, reaching an ending that didn't yet officially exist, swam out into the ocean as deep as they could go, laughing at a distance, and then disconnected one by one without saying goodbye. Designer Kalonica Quigley, who was in that group, says she thinks of it like a memory of hanging out with friends in real life. That's the target the game is aiming at, and it lands.
