Image credit: Press Start / House House

You may have heard that Big Walk, the 12-player open world bumble-a-thon from Untitled Goose Game developers House House, is "a cooperative multiplayer adventure about teamwork and talking". You may have been tempted to call it a "hangout game", or the "antidote to friendslop". You may have read that it's a "sleepy, post-apocalyptic Center Parcs resort", in which players kick rolling lamps around and solve puzzles that involve rocks with keyholes. Such laughable fabrications! Big Walk is actually a serial killer training simulator.

Released just yesterday, it denies you many of the usual multiplayer communication tools, such as squad voice channels, pings, player highlights, and map icons. Instead, you must discourse by means of proximity chat, which is distorted by surfaces and obstacles, or make use of certain devices within the world for long distance communication. If you want to signal somebody across a valley, you'll need either a walkie-talkie or a flaregun or a big whiteboard you can hold over your head with the words "COME HERE" scribbled on it.

Watch on YouTube

Add in some naturalistic foliage and a day-night cycle that casts startlingly believable shadows, and you have the basis for a game in which a friendly player might innocently wander off and become The Forest Itself - an untraceable menace, returning periodically to jumpscare their colleagues. True, Big Walk characters aren't especially well-camouflaged. They all look like playdough Big Bird, albeit with shining eyes that put me strangely in mind of the scrambling orphan from Limbo. But that bulbousness of physique is merely an incentive to skulk harder. Perhaps if I write "NOTHING TO SEE HERE" on my whiteboard? It's just a shame there are (I think?) no carving knives or Halloween masks. There is a paintbrush you can use to decorate character models, mind. Perhaps I can paint myself to look like Slenderman.

I've been looking forward to stalking and upsetting my friends in Big Walk, and I'm outraged to learn that House House are already taking certain steps to make it less stealthy. They're currently cobbling together a patch for the proximity voice audio. "While Big Walk is built around players getting quieter when they are farther away, we can see that for some setups, players' voices are much quieter than intended even when very close by," the devs write on Steam. "We're working to put out a fix as soon as we can."

Mates, you threaten to sabotage all. I have a whole set of terror tactics in mind that involve disembodied voices, inspired by various horror movies. A rich buffet of suspense, extending from "anytime" in Predator to "this house is ours" in The Others. I will whisper these phrases while lurking in bushes along the path, flooding the brains of my buddies with cortisol. But how am I supposed to be subliminal if you turn up the input volume, House House? I guess I'll just have to compensate by putting the computer mic in the sock drawer.

In general, I would love if House House capitalised on the stealth game potential visible in Big Walk. To be clear, this would likely be a massive waste of their time, when they could be adding more routine "friendslop" elements to wow the streamers, and it would entirely go against House House's reputation for prankish amicability. But I would be happy, and what am I, if not the most important person in the room? Maybe modders will take care of it. Anyway, James is working on a longer piece about Big Walk, so I figured I'd get my pitch for a Misanthropy Update out the door first. Are you playing? How are you finding it?