Image: House House/Panic via Polygon … %!s(
Big Walk is a very special game. Since its launch last week, I’ve been delighted to see my social media feeds fill up with videos of players goofing off together in the co-op puzzle adventure. It never fails to put a smile on my face, and that’s a testament to developer House House’s craft. The goofy character designs, the playground colors, the playful puzzles — everything comes together to form a wonderful co-op game that has a way of sticking with you long after you’ve finished it.
It may feel like it came out of nowhere, but Big Walk shouldn’t have been a surprise if you were plugged into the indie game scene circa 2019. You can find so much of its DNA in House House’s award-winning debut game, Untitled Goose Game. If you’ve never played it before, or just haven’t thought about it in years, Untitled Goose Game is currently part of PlayStation Plus Extra. (Convenient for anyone currently playing Big Walk via PS Plus!) It’s worth revisiting if only to see just how closely linked the studio’s two games actually are despite being entirely different on paper.
Untitled Goose Game is hard to classify. It’s somewhere between the stealth and puzzle genres, but neither label properly describes it. You play as a white goose who is hellbent on terrorizing a small town, as geese tend to do. You can steal stuff, honk at children, and generally cause an absolute mess. As mundane as that idea sounds, it was a minor revelation in 2019. Untitled Goose Game won Game of the Year at both the DICE Awards and Game Developers Choice Awards, and for good reason. It’s a creative joy that showed how many untapped game ideas were still out there at a time when it felt like the industry was stagnating.
Looking back at it now, there are three specific components that you can see repeated in Big Walk. The first is character animation. What really sells Untitled Goose Game’s wacky premise is that House House went all-in on animating the actual goose. Despite the fact that it's a humble bird animated in grounded fashion, House House makes every movement as expressive as possible. Something as simple as your goose’s little butt waggle as it clumsily runs around gives the little guy so much character.
The same is true for Big Walk. Its characters are smooth weirdos with balled hands and cylindrical beaks, but they have as much personality as a photorealistic human in a Naughty Dog game. The flailing limbs are a highlight, as are their wiggling mouths. Despite being fictional critters, they feel like real animals with their own distinct behaviors. It’s a natural evolution of the goose.
Image: House House/Panic Inc.My favorite piece of both games is their sound design. Big Walk especially excels here, with its wealth of field recordings that fill the world, and little details in pitter-pattering feet or clicky flashlight buttons. That strength is on full display in Untitled Goose Game, too. The littlest sounds, like your goose’s feet splatting over pavement or a sprinkler watering a garden, go a long way towards making the world feel alive. The star of the show, of course, is the honk. Your goose’s annoying call is arguably what catapulted Untitled Goose Game to meme status. It’s a devious sound effect with enough variations to make you feel like you’re controlling an actual bird.
You likely remember all of that if you played Untitled Goose Game in 2019, but you might have missed the fact that House House later sharpened its multiplayer skills in the game. A September 2020 update added a co-op mode, allowing two players to annoy townies together. You can tell that the seeds for Big Walk were planted there, as the update has players solving bite-sized challenges together in between moments of sandbox silliness. If you never got around to trying it, it’s the perfect way to follow up your Big Walk playthrough.
Whenever I discover a new game I love, I always find it gratifying to return to the developer’s previous work and try to find the links between them. Untitled Goose Game makes for a great replay in that context; it helps reveal all the small details that elevate Big Walk, and reaffirms that House House is one of the finest studios out there. %!s(
