Big Walk ignores ‘friendslop’ trends, and is better for it

I wouldn’t be surprised if the devs at House House are a little disappointed that their new co-op puzzle game, Big Walk, will inevitably draw comparisons to “friendslop,” the loose genre applied to viral hits like Repo, Lethal Company, and Peak.

Despite its floppy characters and emphasis on proximity chat, Big Walk doesn’t have much in common with the biggest friendslop sensations. It has no runs, no quotas, no death—not even a failure state. It doesn’t squeeze comedy from capitalist dystopia or traffic in ragolls. House House (known for 2019’s Untitled Goose Game) began working on Big Walk before the friendslop explosion, and you can tell.

Instead, Big Walk is a loosely structured open world adventure. You wander around with up to 12 friends (I’ve been playing in a group of three) solving puzzles, vibing with nature, and grappling with gaps in communication.

It’s really good so far—we’re six hours into our playthrough with a lot of island left to explore. It’s a funny game, but not in the TikTok-friendly “oops my friend fell off the mountain” way. It can be spooky, but not because a monster roams the woods. It can be challenging, but not because the game gets unreasonably brutal when it decides you’ve survived for too long.

Big Walk is patient, contemplative, and sometimes dull. Not every puzzle we’ve solved was a winner, and the lack of urgency does mean the occasional lull in stimulation. For those reasons, I wonder if this will land for friend groups who routinely assemble for the latest high-concept, gimmicky job thing. Can Big Walk be a hit without enforced absurdity? Probably not, but thankfully, nobody is insisting it has to be.

I’m glad for that, because Big Walk’s memorable moments are rooted in mundanity, like getting lost in the pitch-black night because nobody packed a flashlight, or accidentally kicking our only binoculars off a cliff, or trying to describe a puzzle-relevant drawing from a room away without admitting it looks like a dick and balls.

If Peak is Jenga, fun and repeatable but always the same, Big Walk is a proper campaign—a group project you begin and finish. That once described a lot more co-op games (Portal 2 remains an all-timer), but repeatability has proven far more popular and easy to make. That partially explains why friendslop is already feeling overplayed. As brilliant as those early hits were, Big Walk’s freshness shines a light on the copycats in the room.

Devs are speedrunning how many times they can sell the same three disposable activities before interest fades: What if the store you run has monsters? What if you break stuff instead of gently moving stuff? What if you literally just gamble in a casino? Clearly there’s still gas in this particular tank—one of the top-wishlisted games on Steam right now is “What if you were flight attendants in a messed up plane?”—but it’s also telling that the first breakout indie of 2026, Meccha Chameleon, breaks the friendslop mold with competitive hide-and-seek.

Big Walk deserves similar acclaim. It’s out August 4 for… well, I’m not sure how many dollars, but I would happily pay $20 or $25—it’s a pretty big game!