Big Walk, the co-op adventure from House House, launched on 5 August 2026 for PC, PS5, and Switch 2 — and it landed with a Metacritic metascore of 94 from 14 reviews, making it the highest-rated game of the year at the time of reporting. It is also one of the PlayStation Plus Essential free games for August 2026, meaning subscribers on PS5 got it as part of their membership. But the feature the game is built around — voice chat with your friends — has a bug that is making some players nearly impossible to hear.

In a blog update, House House acknowledged that some players are experiencing a problem where their friends' voices come through too quietly, and the studio apologised. The developer said it is working to release a fix "as soon as it can," though no specific timeline was given. GameSpot

The bug cuts to the heart of how Big Walk works. The game uses proximity-based voice chat: the farther you walk from a friend in the game world, the quieter their voice becomes, mimicking real distance. The system also layers in environmental audio effects — voices echo with reverb when players are inside caves, for instance. When that volume scaling misfires, the feature that is supposed to make coordination feel natural instead makes it a struggle.

Big Walk is not without backup communication tools. Players can use in-game gadgets and visual markers to coordinate, which helps when voice chat falls short. But for a game whose social fabric depends on hearing each other talk, the volume issue is a noticeable wrinkle in an otherwise acclaimed launch.

House House is a small studio with a short but striking track record. Its first game, Push Me Pull You, was a local-multiplayer title released on PS4 and home computers. Its second, Untitled Goose Game, became a breakout hit in 2019, available on Nintendo Switch, PS4, Xbox One, and PC — a stealth-puzzle game about a goose terrorising an English village that sold over a million copies in its first months. Big Walk is the studio's third release, and its first built around online co-op rather than single-player mischief.

For players diving in now, the voice chat fix is the one to watch. The game itself is drawing the kind of review scores that few titles reach in any given year. Once the audio bug is sorted, the picture looks even cleaner.