The indie gaming world has been watching Panic closely since Untitled Goose Game crossed 1 million copies sold within three months of launch — a milestone that quietly shifted the company’s center of gravity away from Mac software and toward publishing.
Now the company is preparing its next move. Panic is set to publish Big Walk, a co-op multiplayer adventure developed by House House — the same studio behind the goose. The game supports up to 12 simultaneous players and is built around proximity voice chat, meaning players must stay physically close to one another in the game world to communicate. A proximity text chat option is also available for those who prefer not to use voice.
Players take the form of cute, anthropomorphized balls with legs and arms, moving through lush natural environments. The action set is deliberately narrow: characters can point their arms, pick things up, and hold objects overhead. That constraint is intentional. According to House House‘s Nico Disseldorp and Stuart Gillespie-Cook, “you can’t make any progress without them, they can’t make any progress without you.” The puzzles are not designed to be hard. Difficulty is not the point.
A Company Built on the Unexpected
The concept grew out of covid-19 lockdowns, when the House House team was playing online games and felt something missing. They wanted, according to Disseldorp, to make “a video game that’s really deliberately about feeling close to each other” — one where “being together is the focus of the game.” The design specifically resists parallel play, where people move through the same experience without truly depending on one another.
For Panic cofounder Cabel Sasser, the decision to back Big Walk over an easier sell — say, a sequel to Goose Game — reflects how the company thinks. “There’s a small part of my dumb business brain that’s like, ‘Whoa, a sequel to Goose Game? People would really love that,'” Sasser told reporters at a roundtable held 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].”
The company has no formal criteria for what it publishes. Sasser says the questions are simple: what will a game bring to the world, can it do something new, and will the team feel good being part of it. That philosophy has produced a catalog with a recognizable texture — Time Flies, about life as a fly; Thank Goodness You’re Here!, a slapstick game about slapping people; Herdling, about moving fuzzy animals.
Gaming Now Bigger Than the Original Business
Panic was founded nearly 30 years ago as a Mac software company. Its first publishing venture came in 2016 with Campo Santo‘s Firewatch. The results took time to compound, but according to Sasser, the company’s video game business has now surpassed its Mac software business in size.
That growth has supported expansion beyond publishing — into its own hardware with the Playdate handheld and a digital games store. Alyssa Harrison, Panic‘s head of publishing, describes the shared quality across its titles as “a sense of whimsy or humor” and an approach that feels “largely quite approachable to potentially non-avid gamers.”
Big Walk will be released on PC and consoles, according to the announcement.
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