Big Walk devs push back on the friendslop label — and reveal the game's real-world Australian inspiration

House House's co-op puzzle game Big Walk has been swept up in the friendslop wave alongside games like Peak, R.E.P.O., RV There Yet?, and Content Warning. In a Reddit AMA, the developers shared their thoughts on the label — and revealed the surprisingly specific real-world location behind the game's distinctly Australian look.

Designer Nico Disseldorp said he appreciates what the term is trying to do. "I love that there is a word out there to help people categorize games that are good for groups of friends to play together, and that it recognizes that the friends are the important part," he wrote. But the second half of the compound word stings a little. "Personally I'd prefer the second word wasn't 'slop' because it's a term with so much baggage (like AI slop) and I think these games are so thoughtfully made." He shrugged it off in the end — "artists always hate the genre names used to describe their work, so it's nothing new" — but the reservation is fair. Meanwhile, developer Jake Strasser confirmed that Big Walk's lush, dry-green world is directly modeled on Wilsons Promontory National Park in south-east Victoria. The team used a LIDAR heightmap of the real location as a starting point, then sculpted and exaggerated the landforms from there. Every plant in the game is native to the Prom, the granite is iconic to the area, and the topography mirrors the real peninsula. House House is also based just a few hours' drive away, so the team could visit in person to gather photo references for textures and record ambient audio on location.

House House is best known for Untitled Goose Game, a game that also drew heavily on a specific, grounded sense of place — a quiet English village rendered with just enough absurdity to make it memorable. Big Walk continues that tradition of rooting a game's feel in something real and tactile, even if the puzzles and co-op structure are the main draw. Australian studios making games explicitly set in Australia is still relatively rare, and Big Walk sits in an interesting middle ground: it's not marketed as an Australian game, but anyone who's spent time in the Victorian bush will recognize it immediately.

PC Gamer's own review of Big Walk sidestepped the friendslop label entirely, describing it instead as "a joyous jaunt through a gentle world full of thoughtfully-designed puzzles" — which, depending on your feelings about genre taxonomy, is either a more precise description or just a more polite one. Either way, the developers seem content to let players call it what they want, slop and all.