Panic, the indie game publishers behind the quirky, yellow crank-sporting Playdate gaming handheld, is issuing refunds to customers who had to shoulder the cost of inappropriate tariffs imposed by the Trump administration this year.

The news comes months after the Supreme Court said in a February ruling that those tariffs were illegal, which also demanded that the administration refund the companies that had to temporarily pay the import taxes. In an update posted on the Playdate help site this week, Panic noted that it has finally "begun to receive refunds of the tariffs we paid in the last year" and had consequently "refunded all tariffs charged to customers."

In the initial version of that tariff note, Panic explained that it couldn't afford to simply "absorb" the 19 percent tariffs it was being charged to import Playdate hardware made overseas because "our margins on Playdate are low." As such, while the tax was in effect, it was passed along to customers as an explicit subtotal line item at the bottom of all Playdate orders. That's in contrast to companies like Nintendo, which vaguely cited "market conditions" and tariff "uncertainty" in raising the asking price of legacy hardware and some Switch 2 accessories last year.

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I’ve spent something like seven hours in funny-thinky cooperative puzzler Big Walk, and the concept of more Big Walk is something that confounds and, just a little bit, frightens me. What, you spent an entire evening stubbing toes in the dark and overconfidently barking incorrect solutions at friends, only for the opening of the map room to reveal the humbling significance of your progress thus far, and you want more? Friend, if I play this until my forties, I might make it halfway through.

Even so, questions on future content were repeatedly put to developers House House in a recent reddit AMA. The response: no plans at the moment, though there’s nothing stopping completionist players from making their own fun with its freeform systems.

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We've all been there. You're out on a hike with some friends, solving some abstract puzzles for a purpose that's not immediately clear, when you get two feet away from your pals and they're as quiet as a dormouse. Or at least, that's been the case for a bunch of folks playing Big Walk, Untitled Goose Game studio House House's latest, as the secret Predator game's approach to proximity chat has made it a little difficult to hear your friends. But an update seemingly fixing the issue is here! Just don't expect to be able to hear anyone from any distance.

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The other week, the SIM card in my phone stopped working. At first, working from home, the change was barely noticeable: a router handled my internet coverage, and Whatsapp messages continued unabated. Only once I left the house did I realise that a safety net had been cut.

I’ve never once called for a fire engine, but the option has long been a source of comfort. Now, suddenly SIMless, I could not. Nor could I check in with my wife about which binbags to buy. Wi-fi spots at Starbucks and shopping centres became little islands, safe ports where I could resume contact while out and about. A weekend away in a big city became a precisely planned operation, during which comms had to be closely managed, for fear of being isolated and left to orienteer through unfamiliar terrain.

Playing Big Walk, I’ve experienced something eerily similar. Though House House have built a jolly multiplayer hiking game, it's placed a huge emphasis on close communication. Proximity chat is demanded, and confined to a tight radius - tighter than in comparable co-op games that have beaten Big Walk to market. In the colourful mountaineering hit Peak, for instance, your friends’ voices only really vanish when one of you drops through the clouds, having attempted an overambitious bout of freeclimbing. And in Content Warning, the extreme vlogging game, the absence of a pal’s screams typically heralds their death at the hands of some faceless snatcher.

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You may have heard that Big Walk, the 12-player open world bumble-a-thon from Untitled Goose Game developers House House, is "a cooperative multiplayer adventure about teamwork and talking". You may have been tempted to call it a "hangout game", or the "antidote to friendslop". You may have read that it's a "sleepy, post-apocalyptic Center Parcs resort", in which players kick rolling lamps around and solve puzzles that involve rocks with keyholes. Such laughable fabrications! Big Walk is actually a serial killer training simulator.

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