Panic’s gaming ambitions hinge on the weird and whimsical

A game about an annoying goose with a button dedicated entirely to honking isn’t the obvious recipe for a hit. But doing the less-obvious thing has become the norm for Panic’s gaming efforts, which have included everything from the Playdate handheld to the surprisingly popular Untitled Goose Game. So when it came time for developer House House to follow up Goose Game, the obvious thing was to do something equally unexpected: Big Walk, a co-op multiplayer adventure where you can play with up to 12 people simultaneously.

“There’s a small part of my dumb business brain that’s like, ‘Whoa, a sequel to Goose Game? People would really love that.’ Because the only thing we ever heard about Goose Game was, ‘I just want more Goose Game,’ Panic cofounder Cabel Sasser tells The Verge in a roundtable interview at Panic’s offices. “However, this is so much more exciting to me than that and I think a million times more interesting to [House House].”

Big Walk is emblematic of how Panic operates its gaming business. Sasser says there are no “hard-and-fast rules” about how it approaches the titles it works on. “It’s really just like: What will this bring into the world of gaming? Can it do something new and interesting? And will we feel good being a part of it?”

Panic was founded nearly 30 years ago as a Mac-focused software company, but in 2016 it dipped its toes into gaming by publishing Campo Santo’s atmospheric Firewatch. It took some time for the company to really make its mark, though; three years later, Panic and House House unleashed Untitled Goose Game unto the world, which surpassed 1 million copies sold three months after its launch.

The success of those games made a lot of Panic’s current gaming efforts possible, and the company has built off of that by pushing in bold and ambitious directions: publishing a carefully curated catalog, selling its own hardware, and running a digital games store. Those aren’t all obvious places to go for an indie publisher, but the gambit appears to be paying off, as Panic’s video game business is actually bigger than its Mac software business, Sasser says.

What unifies Panic’s games is that they’re all distinct. Time Flies is about life as a fly. Blippo Plus turns flipping through channels into a game. Herdling is about herding fuzzy animals. Thank Goodness You’re Here! is a slapstick comedy about slapping people. “All of our games generally have a sense of whimsy or humor or feel largely quite approachable to potentially non-avid gamers,” according to Alyssa Harrison, Panic’s head of publishing.

Big Walk fits right into that mold, based on the hour or so of the game I got to play at Panic’s offices recently. You play as a cute, anthropomorphized series of balls with legs and arms exploring a lush, natural environment. The experience is built around proximity voice chat, meaning you have to be close to other players to be able to talk with them. (There is also a proximity text chat system if you don’t want to talk.) Your character can point their arms, pick things up, and hold them over their head. That limited set of actions forces you to stick with other people to communicate about where you’re going and what you might want to do. There’s a lot of silliness, too; within minutes of starting the game, one of my fellow players was walking around and clanging a cowbell.

The initial spark of Big Walk came from covid-19 lockdowns, House House’s Nico Disseldorp and Stuart Gillespie-Cook tell The Verge. The team was playing a lot of online games and decided to “make a video game that’s really deliberately about feeling close to each other” and where “being together is the focus of the game,” according to Disseldorp. One thing they wanted to avoid was having players move on parallel tracks instead of deliberately working together. In Big Walk, “you can’t make any progress without them, they can’t make any progress without you,” Gillespie-Cook says.

The game’s puzzles and challenges aren’t very tough, but difficulty isn’t the point. Instead, House House is trying to re-create the feeling of playing 20 questions on a hike to help pass the time or playing charades while you’re camping. “These are games that you play with your body, that are about paying attention to each other, about communicating with each other,” Disseldorp says. There are even designated areas just to hang out. At one point, my team approached an orange structure near the coastline with a bunch of square boxes around it that were playing music. I immediately started trying to look for some sort of puzzle. But one of my teammates pointed out that he thought it was a place to dance. “That’s a tutorial for chilling out,” Disseldorp says.

Sasser knew Big Walk was a good fit for Panic because it was, in part, a multiplayer game that is for people who don’t usually play multiplayer games. For a publisher trying to appeal to a non-gaming audience, it’s the perfect way to break into the ultra-competitive multiplayer space. (If you want to try Big Walk at Panic’s offices in Portland, the company is now taking reservations.)

It’s unclear what the future holds for Panic, but despite its relative success, the team is actually looking at scaling back. Panic’s 2025 releases included Despelote, Time Flies, Herdling, Blippo Plus, and Playdate’s second season of games. Now it wants to reduce its output. “We are super proud and excited about every game that we have released, so no regrets at all,” Sasser says. “But it was a lot for a small team to do a lot of games.” (Panic’s dedicated games team is just three people.) “When you’re a very small team, games landing too close to each other has a major detrimental effect,” Harrison says, adding that “it just feels better when we’re able to more deeply focus.”

For now, Panic’s focus is helping get Big Walk ready; it launches on PC and PS5 this year. We don’t know what comes after, but knowing Panic, it’ll definitely be a surprise.