Big Walk Lands with a 94 on Metacritic — House House's Co-Op Adventure Is 2026's Best-Reviewed Game

House House, the Melbourne studio behind Untitled Goose Game, released Big Walk on August 4, 2026 for PC (Windows and macOS), PlayStation 5, and Nintendo Switch 2. It launched with a 94 on Metacritic, making it the highest-rated game of 2026 through its launch day. The studio has done it again — and done something entirely different.

What it is

Big Walk is a cooperative multiplayer adventure for 1 to 12 players. There are no enemies to fight, no timers, no leaderboards. Players explore a wide, open world built around environmental puzzles, item handoffs, and physics-based challenges — and they talk their way through it using a proximity voice chat system that responds to the physical environment. Voices fade with distance, echo in corridors, muffle through walls, and crackle when routed through the in-game walkie-talkies scattered across the world.

That last detail is not a cosmetic feature. The communication system is the central mechanic: puzzles require players who are separated to coordinate in real time, relying on degraded audio and the mental model each person builds of what the others can hear. It turns a co-op game into something closer to a shared experience of being physically present in a place together.

Why it works

NME called it one of the best-reviewed games of 2026. Third Coast Review's day-one review described it as "multiplayer Myst" and among the reviewer's favorite games in ten years of covering the medium. The design philosophy is recognizably House House: strip out every element that makes games feel like work, and keep only the part that makes them feel like play.

The world is inspired by Wilsons Promontory National Park in Victoria, Australia. It is large and detailed enough to reward wandering, with optional discoveries layered on top of the main path through. Players carry tools — walkie-talkies, binoculars, megaphones, flares, whiteboards — each of which changes how they interact with the environment and with each other. Permanent failure is off the table: puzzles retry infinitely, and nobody can die.

The multiplayer context

Big Walk supports crossplay between PC, PlayStation 5, and Switch 2. Published by Panic — the same indie publisher behind Firewatch, Untitled Goose Game, and Playdate — it carries the studio's track record of polish and follow-through on promises.

The 12-player cap is large enough that the game works as an event: the kind of thing a friend group or online community can schedule for an evening and get something meaningful out of, rather than a game demanding long-term commitment across sessions. That positioning, combined with a complete narrative arc, makes it one of the more accessible multiplayer releases in recent memory.

Big Walk arrived in August 2026 with almost no pre-launch hype cycle and immediately became the most critically praised game of the year. House House built something genuinely new, and the reviews reflect that.