Creators of Untitled Goose Game turn Australia into a playground

There's nowhere quite like Wilson's Promontory, the Victorian national park that lies at the southernmost tip of mainland Australia.

The coastal destination boasts a beach with sand so fine each footstep makes a squeak like treading on a dog toy, a dramatic range of granite mountains, and a scenic landscape studded with boulders tinged rust red.

And Wilson's Prom can now lay claim to the co-operative video game Big Walk, a game that, unusually, prioritises (mis)communication and relaxed house party vibes as players escape puzzle rooms scattered across its vast expanse.

For its developer, House House, the Melbourne studio behind 2019 breakout Untitled Goose Game, there was more behind the chosen location than its awe-inspiring geography.

"It's such a magical place," says co-founder Jake Strasser, who has spent the last six years hand-placing every rock in the game's loose 1:20 scale recreation of Wilson's Prom.

"It has a kind of magnetism to it."

When Strasser's partner proposed to him at Wilson's Prom on a mid-production research trip, the already magical place became even more special.

Meanwhile, fellow co-founder Stuart Gillespie-Cook is a regular visitor to his relative's farm in nearby Fish Creek in South Gippsland.

Using lidar scans that provided a 3D map of the national park, the team produced an unusually naturalistic space, scattering puzzle rooms across the landscape to become what Gillespie-Cook compares to "a big outdoor sculpture garden".

Big Walk's convincing rendition of the Australian bush came about thanks to the team's deep familiarity with the area, bolstered by a week-long research camping trip and on-location recording to gather sights and sounds specific to the region.

That included a sound designer pounding Squeaky Beach with their fists to record its unmistakable sounds.

Such detailed recreations of Australian nature are rare in this medium, with other examples, such as Death Stranding 2: On The Beach often taking dramatic ecological and geographic liberties.

"I guess why a lot of games don't do it is because it's incredibly laborious to make a whole bunch of plants," Strasser says.

The team's 3D artist, Kalonica Quigley, rectified that gap by developing 3D models for 80-100 native plants, which Strasser faithfully placed in the virtual landscape according to Victoria's Ecological Vegetation Class, used to categorise localised flora ecosystems.

"We'd break it up into a bunch of different biomes, like you have in video games," says Strasser. "But instead of snow biomes and lava biomes, we had salt marsh and wet eucalyptus forests and dry eucalyptus forests."

While video game logic determined the variety of environments in Big Walk, the geographic foundation of Wilson's Prom gave the game its own quirks and an unruly, unorthodox character to match the real wilderness.

"A lot of the paths are designed so that you feel like you're the first person who's ever walked along there. You're being guided by an invisible hand that you never fully see," Gillespie-Cook says.

"[There aren't] explicit bushwalking paths — you feel a bit intrepid choosing where to go."

Playing make-believe

Like the best camping trips, Big Walk is about the people you're with as much as the view.

Players communicate by voice chat whenever they're close-by. When forced to split up, they're required to engage in long-distance charades, using outstretched arms, hand signals, flashlights, laser pointers — anything they can put their hands on — to try to bridge the communication gap.

As an example, a puzzle may set a task like asking one player to climb a mountain to identify a symbol. They then try to communicate what they see, often using frantic gestures, to another player watching their movements through a telescope.

The result is an entertaining cycle of planning and execution —either a memorably muddled success or a botched attempt that ends in reconvening to laugh, debrief and try again.

Creating and exploiting communication gaps in this way is more akin to social games like charades or Pictionary than conventional escape room or devious adventure-game puzzles.

Gillespie-Cook sees this as an underexplored space compared to pure mechanical puzzles.

Games of moving blocks, deciphering codes and finding hidden items lack the communication, comprehension and delegated teamwork tested by Big Walk.

"Drawing a squiggle is a fun thing to try and communicate to someone else," says Gillespie-Cook.

"It's the game of seeing a horse in the clouds and pointing at it to your friend but we codify and gamify it.

"A really early lesson we learned is that those kinds of logic puzzles preference a certain type of thinking," Gillespie-Cook continues, comparing their intended approach to the make-believe games and assigned roles played by kids.

"If puzzles are completely solvable by one person, that person is generally going to step up and solve the whole thing. Then everyone else is going to be a bit bored."

Stumbling onto the latest trend

Big Walk's six-year development cycle was a long lead time for an indie studio, even with the financial buffer provided by the success of the 2020 BAFTA Games winner Untitled Goose Game.

"When we started Big Walk, we really thought this is a non-commercial project," Gillespie-Cook says. 

"We've got some leeway. We could make a flop if we wanted to."

With development starting during lockdown, the meetings the team had in-game were their only way to stay connected. Other, faster teams were working on similar ideas, too.

In the last three years low-budget, often quickly designed online multiplayer games with an emphasis on social hangouts built around the same 'proximity voice chat'' tools used by Big Walk have become a post-COVID industry phenomenon.

These online co-operative games, such as shooter Lethal Company, mountain climber Peak and hide-and-seek game Meccha Chameleon, have sold between 10-20 million copies, with waves of imitators looking to emulate their success.

House House started ahead of the trend. Nearer release, they feared their prolonged work on the game (by their own admission, they enjoyed working on it too much) had taken so long they'd missed it entirely.

Big Walk came out in early August. In less than a week it has already sold in excess of 1million copies, more than double the 400,000 visitors who come to Wilson's Promontory every year.

"It feels fun to be swept up in it," says Gillespie-Cook, who still regards himself as a newcomer to online multiplayer games after a lifelong aversion to the format — despite having spent the last six years making one.

"It wasn't until lockdown where I found I needed them. It turned out to be really good to connect with friends and I realised I've been missing a huge trick here."