Big Walk hit by review bombing after House House AI disclosure
Big Walk, the co-op adventure from Untitled Goose Game developer House House, has drawn a wave of negative Steam reviews after the studio revealed it used large language models late in development, according to a report from the source outlet.
What House House disclosed
The studio added an AI section to the game’s FAQ. It says chatbot responses were sometimes used as starting points for code that was then modified. House House estimates that “well under 0.1%” of the game’s code had anything to do with this usage, and says generative AI was not used in any other part of development.
Review numbers shift
Big Walk launched on August 4 and is still rated Very Positive overall on Steam. Its recent review history changed sharply once the disclosure spread. On November 9, Steam recorded 135 positive reviews and three negative ones. The next day, the totals were 426 positive and 366 negative. When checked on November 11, the figures were 358 positive and 90 negative.
How the AI was used
House House said its main use of LLMs was researching problems in third-party code. It gave an example involving Unity’s Universal Render Pipeline (URP), where shadow casters behind the player were reportedly being rendered at an infinite distance. The studio said this made Big Walk run about 50% slower for roughly 20 seconds during sunrise and sunset scenes.
The developers said they investigated the issue themselves and spoke with a Unity engineer before asking a chatbot for another possible fix. The chatbot’s suggestion was then modified extensively, and the final change amounted to around 10 lines of code inside URP.
House House said it did not flag the assistance on Steam because Valve does not ask developers to disclose code or chatbot usage. The studio said the FAQ statement was first written for its Independent Games Festival (IGF) submission and was published after the matter became public.
Studio apologizes, plans a policy
House House stressed that the statement is not an endorsement of AI tools. It apologized that the use may not meet some people’s standards and described the lack of an internal AI policy as a failure. The studio said it intends to develop a more comprehensive policy.
IGF context
The debate began after 19 IGF jurors said they would decline to vote for any game that used generative AI in development. Their statement included AI-generated code and noted that it did not speak for the whole IGF organization or for every juror.
House House disclosed the AI use as part of its IGF submission. No official announcement has confirmed whether Big Walk was disqualified from the awards.
Source: dexerto.com
Image: dexerto.com
