Big Walk and the magic of proximity chat

House House just announced that Big Walk will be out on August 4 for PC/Mac on Steam, Switch 2, and PlayStation 5, with cross-play between all platforms. The followup to Untitled Goose Game, the Melbourne-based team spent six years building an open world for you to explore with your friends, a virtual play space for 2-10 friends with cooperative challenges built around the constraints of its proximity-based voice chat. This is, hands down, my most anticipated game of the year. I’ve followed its development for years through my friends at Panic, but have largely managed to avoid spoiling myself. Like my own Skittish project, House House was inspired by the distance imposed by lockdowns in the early pandemic. Like I did with Skittish, House House felt that proximity chat could be a good way to bring people together in a more natural way online, when they couldn’t be together in person. Big Walk plays with this idea in different ways, putting players in spaces where they can see but not…