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When House House set out to create a multiplayer adventure centered around getting lost in the Australian bush, their primary goal was likely to capture the magic of undirected, cooperative exploration. They wanted to simulate the feeling of rambling through nature with close friends, equipped with nothing but walkie-talkies and a shared sense of curiosity. However, less than a month after its launch, Big Walk is rapidly gaining a reputation for something entirely unexpected: it is becoming the ultimate remote team-building and corporate trust exercise.
This phenomenon was recently brought into the spotlight by the acclaimed video game podcast Triple Click, hosted by Kirk Hamilton, Jason Schreier, and Maddy Myers. In their August 20th episode, the hosts dedicated a significant portion of their show to discussing how Big Walk functioned as a “corporate trust exercise that has made us all better co-workers and better people.” While spoken with a degree of their trademark humor, the underlying sentiment rings incredibly true for anyone who has spent more than a few hours navigating the game’s deceptively challenging cooperative puzzles.
To understand why Big Walk excels as a communication workshop, one must look closely at its foundational mechanics. Unlike traditional cooperative games where players share a screen or have immediate access to a mini-map showing everyone’s exact location, Big Walk deliberately obscures information. You are dropped into a massive, open-world environment inspired by Wilsons Promontory, and the game explicitly refuses to hold your hand. If you wander off to investigate a strange landmark, you are genuinely separated from your group. Your only tether to your teammates is the game’s meticulously crafted distance voice chat and the handheld walkie-talkies you carry in your inventory.
This creates a scenario where clear, concise, and descriptive communication isn’t just helpful; it is mandatory for progress. When a player on the Triple Click podcast mentioned the experience of “falling off cliffs” together, they were touching on a core loop of the game. Failure in Big Walk is rarely punished with a game over screen or a loss of hard-earned experience points. Instead, failure usually results in physical separation. If you miss a jump and tumble down a ravine, you aren’t dead, but you are suddenly very far away from your partner. You must now use your walkie-talkie to describe your surroundings—“I’m near a large, oddly shaped limestone rock, next to a patch of blue ferns”—while your partner attempts to triangulate your position based on their own surroundings. This forces a level of active listening and spatial awareness that standard corporate icebreakers could never hope to achieve.
For remote teams who have spent the last several years suffering through awkward Zoom happy hours or forced digital trivia games, Big Walk offers a refreshing alternative. It provides a shared, low-stakes objective that requires genuine collaboration. We have previously discussed how this game serves as a brilliant alternative to traditional virtual hangouts in our piece on how friendslop and zoom parties shaped House House’s Big Walk. The game strips away the professional facade, forcing players to rely on each other in vulnerable, often hilarious ways. You cannot successfully navigate a complex environmental puzzle without implicitly trusting the person on the other end of the radio.
The game scales brilliantly depending on the size of your team, supporting anywhere from 2 to 12 players. While a duo might experience an intimate, intense puzzle-solving session, a group of eight or ten coworkers will experience something closer to a chaotic, joyful expedition. Managing comms in a large group requires establishing actual radio discipline. Players quickly learn that talking over one another on the walkie-talkies results in incomprehensible static. Leaders naturally emerge to coordinate movements, while others might take on the role of scouts or puzzle-solvers. The community has already begun organizing massive 12-player expeditions, showcasing how the game handles larger social dynamics.
Furthermore, the game’s tools are incredibly tactile and require deliberate teamwork. You can’t just press a button to share your vision with a teammate. If you find a map, you have to physically hold it up for others to see. If you want to plan a route, you might need to use the in-game whiteboards to draw out a crude diagram. These interactions mimic real-world problem-solving in a way that feels organic and deeply satisfying. When a plan comes together—when one player drops a flare to signal their location, another uses the binoculars to spot the objective, and a third relays instructions over the radio—the sense of shared accomplishment is palpable.
The psychological safety provided by the game’s cozy aesthetic is also a major factor in its success as a team-building tool. The world is bright, beautiful, and devoid of traditional enemies or combat stress. This allows players to drop their guard. It is entirely acceptable to be terrible at Big Walk; the game embraces clumsiness and confusion. Getting hopelessly lost is not a failure state, but rather the intended experience. We explored this design philosophy in depth in our article regarding why getting lost is the heart of Big Walk’s adventure. When colleagues can laugh together about spending forty-five minutes walking in a circle because someone misread a compass, it builds a reservoir of goodwill that translates back into their actual work environment.
It is no surprise that prominent voices in the gaming industry like the Triple Click crew are recognizing the profound social impact of House House’s latest creation. By forcing us to rely on our words, our patience, and our willingness to look a little foolish while tumbling down a virtual hillside, Big Walk is doing more than just entertaining us. It is teaching us how to communicate better, how to listen more intently, and how to trust the voice crackling through the static on the other side of the island.