Push Me Pull You - Games Lab

Push Me Pull You’s influence on Untitled Goose Game

Push Me Pull You and Untitled Goose Game are very different, but if you look closely you can see a clear design lineage between House House’s first and second games.

In Push Me Pull You, the player-character expresses themselves visually – through images and icons that appear in speech bubbles. Untitled Goose Game borrows this visual for the villagers, whose missing objects appear in similar thought bubbles when they are searching for them.

Untitled Goose Game and Push Me Pull You also highlights House House’s interest in puppetry – in both games, the fun derives from piloting a silly body around an environment.

Push Me Pull You character design

Unlike Untitled Goose Game’s goose, the player characters in Push Me Pull You are customisable. This is important in local multiplayer games, where players play the same characters repeatedly over time – a regular Mario Kart player will often race as Peach or Luigi (or whoever their favourite character is), and feel a specific competitiveness with other specific characters. House House wanted to foster a similar sense of attachment to the wriggly bodies in Push Me Pull You.

House House developed a graphic system, nicknamed ‘the arthead’, which depicted the same character face at ¾ angle, so that these bespoke avatars could also appear on the post-game celebration screen.

Push Me Pull You Early Days

Push Me Pull You was House House’s first game. It was inspired by Noby Noby Boy (Namco Bandai, 2009), which features a tube-like monster character, and the ‘Hokra’ game in Sportsfriends (Die Gute Fabrik, 2013), a 2v2 soccer-style game.

Push Me Pull You is a silly sports game that’s meant to be played locally by friends. Players each control a different end of a two-headed creature to wrestle for possession of a ball. It’s also meant to make you laugh. The silliness isn’t a bug, it’s a feature.

Far from being professional game developers, House House had diverse creative backgrounds, and they learned a lot of the technical skills of game development during the making of the game.