Big Walk is out. It released on 4 August 2026 across Steam, the Mac App Store, PlayStation 5 and Nintendo Switch 2 at the same time — no staggered rollout, no platform exclusivity window.
House House’s own confirmation, from the official FAQ: “As of August 4th, 2026, Big Walk is now out. Enjoy.”
Release date
| Released | 4 August 2026 |
| Announced | 8 December 2023, at The Game Awards |
| Gameplay first shown | 7 June 2025, at Day of the Devs (Summer Game Fest) |
| Original window | 2025, moved to 2026 |
| Platforms at launch | All four, simultaneously |
The timeline
December 2023 — announced. Big Walk was revealed at The Game Awards with a 1:32 trailer, four years after Untitled Goose Game and with a stated 2025 window.
June 2025 — delayed, and console versions confirmed. At Day of the Devs during Summer Game Fest, House House showed the first real gameplay in a 3:50 overview, confirmed console versions, and moved the release to 2026.
February 2026 — PS5 confirmed, with PS Plus. The PlayStation 5 version was confirmed along with the news that it would join PlayStation Plus monthly games on day one.
June 2026 — Switch 2 added and the date locked. A Nintendo Switch 2 version was announced and 4 August 2026 was set.
August 2026 — released. Reviews landed on 3 August, a day ahead of launch, with a Metacritic aggregate of 94 for the PC version.
Where it released
| Platform | Price | Download | Subscription | Friends list | Metacritic |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Steam | $14.99 | — | No paid subscription required | Yes | 94 |
| Mac App Store | — | — | No paid subscription required | No | — |
| PS5 | Included with PlayStation Plus Essential | — | PlayStation Plus (also the route to the free copy) | Yes | 86 |
| Switch 2 | $14.99 | 3.9 GB | Nintendo Switch Online — required for online play and cloud saves | Yes | 82 |
Big Walk is digital-only on all four. There is no physical release, no PS4 version, and — per the official FAQ — “no other platforms are planned at this time”, which rules out Xbox and Game Pass.
The pricing at launch: $19.99 base on Steam with a 25% launch discount to $14.99; $14.99 on Switch 2 until 18 August 2026; free with PlayStation Plus on PS5 until 31 August 2026.
Who made it
House House — an independent studio founded in 2014 in Melbourne, Australia. Their previous games are Push Me Pull You (2016) and Untitled Goose Game (2019). Their own description of the through-line: games “as different to one another as they are to anything else you’ve played before.”
Panic — publisher. Also known for Firewatch, Untitled Goose Game and the Playdate handheld.
Credited on the official site: Kalonica Quigley (environment art), Em Halberstadt (sound design), Nicholas Zhang (sound programming), and AKSFX (music). Design is credited to Stuart Gillespie-Cook, Nico Disseldorp, Michael McMaster and Jacob Strasser; the AKSFX music is by Sam Gill and Luke Neher, and was written to be diegetic — carried by objects inside the world rather than laid over it.
The environment draws on Wilsons Promontory National Park in Victoria, Australia, which is why the game looks like nowhere else: real eucalypt forest and granite coastline, with flat saturated structures dropped into it.
What House House made before this
Big Walk is the studio’s third game in twelve years, and the three have almost nothing in common with each other.
Push Me Pull You (2016) was a local multiplayer sports game about two-headed bodies sharing a torso. Untitled Goose Game (2019) was a slapstick stealth game about a goose ruining a village’s morning, and became one of the defining indie hits of its year — particularly in Japan, where it was a Switch phenomenon.
House House’s own framing of the through-line, from their press kit: Big Walk “continues their string of surprising, funny, and friendly games that are as different to one another as they are to anything else you’ve played before.”
That matters for expectation-setting. Someone arriving from Untitled Goose Game will find a game with no mischief mechanic, no single-player, and a three-hour-plus structure rather than a set of vignettes. The continuity is in the tone, not the design.
The music, and why you might not notice it
The soundtrack is credited to AKSFX — Sam Gill and Luke Neher — and was written to be diegetic: carried by objects inside the world rather than laid over the top of it.
In practice that means music comes from things you can walk towards, and it shares the same spatial audio system that makes voices fade with distance and muffle through walls. In a game where locating a sound is a navigational skill, music that exists in the world rather than in your headphones is part of the mechanic rather than accompaniment.
The soundtrack is available through AKSFX directly, linked from the official site.
Why it slipped from 2025
The original announcement gave a 2025 window. In June 2025, at Day of the Devs during Summer Game Fest, House House showed the first substantial gameplay and simultaneously moved the release into 2026 while confirming console versions were coming.
The trade is visible in the final product. What shipped in August 2026 launched on four storefronts at once, with crossplay working across all of them from day one, fourteen languages, and a Switch 2 version supporting that console’s mouse mode. For a three-person studio, that is a different scope of release than a PC-first launch would have been, and it is a plausible explanation for the extra year.
The reception suggests the delay was worth taking: PC reviews aggregated to 94 on Metacritic, the highest of any 2026 release at the time of launch, and the game went straight into PlayStation Plus as a monthly title on its release day.