Why gamers can’t get enough of ‘friendslop’

A warning precedes the latest adventure from Australian developer House House. “Big Walk is a game about talking to your friends,” reads a screen the first time you boot it up. But, it continues, “No voice calls. No talking face-to-face. No looking at other players’ screens.” What it wants you to do instead is use the in-game voice chat, which allows you to speak to characters near your own, but quickly reduces them to a distant echo as you move further apart.

That matters in a game that relies on co-ordination as much as Big Walk does. You play as a cartoonish and faintly ant-like troupe of spindly limbed creatures setting out on the titular big walk, a journey across an island of leafy landscapes and gentle puzzles. It is a journey wholly without explanation or back-story, which means that the tone is set by your group dynamic and that the only dialogue you need focus on is your own.

Within 10 seconds of starting we lose one of our group in the night-time darkness that has enveloped the island. A few minutes later another tries (unsuccessfully) to swim to freedom off the edge of the map. Unable to communicate with them until they return, we must make do with waving our arms or flashing lights to attract their attention. We do learn an important lesson, though: anyone can interfere with what anyone else is doing — carrying items, completing objectives, simply standing minding their own business — which creates a fine line between co-operative gameplay and light-hearted sabotage.

It’s this fine line that pushes Big Walk into the realm of friendslop — an ugly but often surprisingly affectionate term for a popular set of games whose enjoyment derives primarily from the interactions with the people playing alongside you, rather than the gameplay itself. Originally coined on social media to describe a kind of anime, the label reflects a growing desire for light-hearted, low-priced, communication-driven experiences.

Not every multiplayer game is friendslop, of course. The label applies to games where friends aren’t just present in your adventures, they define them. They rely on what developers call “emergent gameplay” — the unscripted consequences of deliberate design choices. In Big Walk, for example, you are only able to change the look of your character through an oversized paintbrush wielded by another player. Given that you experience the game from a first-person perspective, you generally have to take their word that they’ve painted you the colour you asked for. And if they haven’t, there’s nothing stopping you from giving them a fetching yellow makeover in return. It is an early test of your group’s cohesion, but one just as likely to fuel suspicion as it is interdependence.

One of the earliest games to march under the friendslop banner was 2018’s Among Us. When Marcus Bromander and Forest Willard, co-founders of US developer Innersloth, used to play Mafia as students, they found their homes too small for the deception-based party game. Among Us was designed to let the same dynamics of deduction and deception play out on a virtual spaceship. Players find themselves divided into two teams: crewmates and imposters. The crewmates can win by completing tasks to fix the spaceship and identifying the imposters; the imposters can win by preventing the tasks from being completed or killing crewmates.

There’s not a great deal of complexity in the game itself. Its brightly coloured 2D settings and point-and-click mechanics instead shift the focus to your friends’ ability to convince the rest of the group of their guilt or innocence. This plays out at regular meetings where players must vote each other out of the game after trying to justify their behaviour.

Willard admits to a fondness for the friendslop label. “A known issue with massive multiplayer games is you will sometimes end up with some toxic players, and being able to play with friends tempers that issue,” he says. “Today’s social games leave you with an experience of playing with your friends that is as good as your friends are, not as good as the community around that game.”

In Aggro Crab and Landfall Games’ 2025 release Peak, the only way you can play the game is with friends. There is no lobby browser (a list of public games you can join), and no queue that will match you with random players. The result is that when your group of scouts crash-lands on an improbably vertiginous island, as it does at the beginning of every session, it will be composed of players you know and trust.

Emphasis on know, really, because the first time a companion fails to help pull you up the final stretch of an especially difficult rock face, you will start to develop trust issues. The aim of the game is to get through five daily-changing climbs that lead to a summit where rescue awaits, but gravity isn’t the only thing standing between you and the top. There is vicious wildlife, poisonous berries — even a possessed scoutmaster who will appear if you abandon your friends, chasing you until you reunite with them. This means there’s little incentive to go it alone, even when your climbing partners are armed with tuneless bugles and paralysis-inducing blow darts.

Big Walk goes one step further: most of its puzzles — which demand an entertaining mix of observation, dexterity, memory and exploration — are impossible without the participation of the other players, and it will even scale them to the size of the group.

Just as in Peak, there is no way to play Big Walk with strangers, since you need to be friends with someone to invite them to your lobby. In these games, it’s not about the friends we made along the way — it’s about spending time with the ones we already have.

‘Big Walk’ is out now on PC, PlayStation 5 and Nintendo Switch 2