In the three years since Big Walk was announced, I’ve heard it referred to as a co-op walking sim, a puzzle-adventure game, and friendslop. After spending 20+ hours in the world of the Australian Outback-inspired game, it’s no easier to succinctly define it, because it’s not actually like anything else. By inventively stripping down the medium to its most essential parts, it invites novices and experts alike to build it back up from scratch, coloring in its mysterious world with their friends by their side. We need a new word for whatever kind of game Big Walk really is, but here’s one for now: unforgettable.
Big Walk is a game about walking and talking with friends, played in first-person for groups of 2-12 players. Embodying vaguely humanoid characters–think multicolored snowmen with long noses and noodly appendages–you and your friends will trek across a vast and open island, hunting down nameless MacGuffins by way of solving an abundance of inventive puzzles together. This intentionally basic setup belies the depth you’ll discover the more time you spend on its island.
Before you head off, you’ll convene in a starting area that looks a bit like a playground or a children’s gym, full of buttons to push; vibrant, sometimes bouncy objects to pick up and kick; and climbable surfaces. It’s here where you’ll learn most everything you need to know about what you can do, like all the gestures you can make with your body, how to use proximity chat to your aid, and how to deal with the physics of the world. For example, you may note how falling a great distance doesn’t mean taking fall damage, but it may mean you drop what you were holding and lose it in a forest until the sun comes up.
The first four puzzles act as a tutorial. In a more limited section of the island, you’ll seek them out deep in the woods, high atop hills, or along beaches, work together to solve them, and unlock their corresponding MacGuffins, then place them in a console that unlocks virtually the entire rest of the island all at once. From there, it’s your group’s call to make, and your path through the world won’t be the same as any other.
Unlike Peak, which the game has often been compared to, Big Walk’s island is handcrafted, not randomly generated, and it shows. Every inch of the world feels intentional, from the switchbacks down the mountainsides meant to give you the hint of a far-off landmark, to the radio stations you can come across, each of them playing their own special song that you can carry with you if you’re in the mood for some music on your journey. Because there are so many puzzles, sometimes you’ll even take aspects of one puzzle to solve others, and the game offers clever environmental hints when this is required.
In small ways, puzzles change depending on your group size. The host maintains the save data across sessions, allowing players to join or drop when they may need to, but different versions of the island exist for parties of two, three, or four-plus, with slight tweaks to each puzzle to accommodate the number of people in a group.
No matter your team size, Big Walk adjusts to give you an appropriate challenge.
Some puzzles will be a bit easier with more people putting their heads together, while others will be much more chaotic; one of the first puzzles my group found was basically a basketball hoop with big bouncy lights as the ball, and if you don’t easily tame a group of a dozen players, you’ll all be knocking each other’s shots away from the basket until someone takes command and establishes a turn order.
There’s a remarkable clarity to the visual language in Big Walk that’s conveyed right at the start, but everything else there is to know about it is built on a foundation you make together with your friends, establishing your own vocabulary and body language in such an effortlessly cool, intuitive way that so many other games seem afraid of. Playing with two of my kids, we took to calling the dozens of MacGuffins “eggy things” because of their somewhat egg-like shape, and we called our characters “walklings.”
As the hazy semblance of a story unfolded, we made sense of it in our own words. Big Walk clearly hopes each group does this. That’s why it fills its world with fundamental video game objects and objectives, like puzzles and their rewards, but adds nothing definitive beyond that.
Big Walk’s world speaks for itself. There are no quest markers or on-screen prompts, and no stamina or health bars to manage. Every aspect of the game is diegetic, and every discovery is of your own making. There’s no lore dump or explainer as to who you are or why you’re solving puzzles on an island that only your group seems to inhabit. Across its realistic-looking landscape are many more cartoonishly colored structures of all shapes and sizes that stick out by contrast, and developer House House trusts each friend group to carve out their own adventure through the world, letting their curiosity guide them and building on shared learning hour after hour.
Getting a bird’s-eye view of the island reveals just how much there is to see and do.
Some puzzles demand you work closely together side by side, timing your actions just right or fidgeting with buttons and points of view, while others demand you split up, sometimes for long stretches at a time and across great distances. In those instances, finding each other afterward is its own sort of puzzle to solve. Many puzzles will inhibit your ability to communicate, like one where a player is locked behind soundproof glass and must relay information to the others that only the lone walkling has. There are probably only about six to eight core concepts the game focuses on, but each time House House returns to an idea, it adds clever new wrinkles.
In one of the game’s most devilishly designed puzzles, I was forced to wear a helmet that blinded me, leaving my group to guide me across a treacherous obstacle course with only their vocal callouts. Hours later on our journey, this same dastardly helmet showed up again, but with new rules that demanded I, as the helmet-wearer again, carry the right objects to their intended corners of an area, which meant our group needed to figure out which were the right objects in the first place, before I could even begin to follow their vocal instructions.
I can think of a few puzzles that were quite daunting, especially with a seven-year-old in the group, but none frustrated us. Often, we’d climb to a mountaintop to get a lay of the land, head off toward some vibrant structure in the middle of a wooded area, and fidget with its movable parts until we got a sense of what we needed to do. Through clear collaboration and our own invented language, we’d achieve success–sometimes quickly, in just a few minutes, but other times after much more head-scratching for puzzles that took us 20 or more minutes to solve. Every time we’d solve a puzzle, my kids and I would rejoice with a chant: “Egg-y thing! Egg-y thing!” while throwing our walklings’ hands into the air together.
Though the game is light on traditional story, it feels like describing many of its amazing puzzles is a type of spoiler. The ritual of genuine discovery, followed by cooperative experimentation, and finally, shared elation, is the magic of Big Walk, doled out with the completion of each puzzle, but even more often in the in-between moments when you’re just chatting as you explore the outback. For a few hours every night, for about two weeks, this was our beloved ceremony together. We helped each other get our bearings, found each other when we’d gotten lost and separated, and commended each other when one of us would crack the solution to a puzzle wide open.
The way Big Walk nudges players to work together in tight-knit ways is a recurring bit of genius.
Big Walk has a defined ending and isn’t meant to be played forever, though with a different group of friends, it does retain some appeal. When we weren’t playing it, we were talking about it, trying to solve some puzzles we’d set aside if they’d stumped us for too long, or crafting theories about the massive black orb that waited beyond a wall we couldn’t (yet?) access. It’s a game of few words, opting instead to give players a massive canvas on which to create their own story together. For a handful of special evenings, the island was our home away from home.
With every few puzzles, major new rewards become available, like a train that moves around the island or a giant map room to help plot your travels. You may also stumble upon totally missable shortcuts, reinforcing that your triumphs are yours to celebrate and not based on any HUD arrow you’ve followed. You’ll come upon helpful handheld items, like walkie-talkies, flashlights, and megaphones, but as best I can recall, such items tend to make some puzzles easier, but they’re rarely required, so it becomes a question of, for example, leaving the puzzle to find a pair of walkie-talkies or solving a puzzle without them even if it would clearly help a lot.
Inventory space is limited to what you can carry in your hands, on your belt, or in your backpack, and anything you’re not holding can’t even be accessed on your own. You’ll need a buddy to take that backpack off of you if you want to consult the paper map you may have stashed inside of it. This seemingly small design decision really speaks to Big Walk’s main idea. First imagined during the COVID pandemic, House House sought to make a game that brings people closer to one another, to get them talking and having meaningful interactions. For me, it worked wonders.
It’s not often my kids and I can all play a game together with the same enthusiasm, as the taste preferences among a 37-, 13-, and seven-year-old don’t tend to align. But Big Walk offers a gameplay loop that feels universal in its appeal. It deconstructs video games into their most foundational verbs: discover, experiment, prevail. The context of a mysterious island and the silly-looking characters you play as surely enhance the experience, but it’s the simplistic gameplay loop taken to a depth that is exciting but never so involved as to leave some players behind that makes it so easily beloved.
Though it’s not as slapstick-funny as some games with shared DNA, Big Walk definitely has a comedic side.
Though it leaves room for goofing off, Big Walk doesn’t have the cadence of a friendslop game, where the purposely janky sabotage of your friends’ best intentions is much of the fun. Some failures can be amusing, and the game as a whole definitely has an understated comedic tone befitting of its Australian dev studio, but the true highlight is the shared joys of exploring the world and overcoming its obstacles through thoughtful communication and teamwork.
There’s a lot more stopping and thinking in Big Walk than perhaps its title suggests. You’ll do plenty of walking, but you’ll do even more talking, and if you’re playing with friends or family you love and appreciate, it’s bound to be a deeply rewarding experience.
It’s also a well-polished game, with the only bug I encountered serving as an accidentally hilarious moment–when my daughter’s walkling got stuck in a folding chair and we carried her around for a while like she was Cleopatra.
The only noticeable knock on the game is one that demands some self-policing. Without using Big Walk’s proximity chat, you’d turn its magic off like flipping a switch. Using Steam or Discord chat, for example, would act like a cheat code, circumventing a puzzle’s intentional friction, such as when proximity chat is intended to fail at times, blocking you from easily talking to your group. So it’s really on you to choose not to do that, or else accept that you’ve opted to make the game worse for yourself.
This is where it shares the most in common with more typical friendslop games like Peak and Lethal Company. The element of proximity chat does a lot of heavy lifting to make Big Walk shine brightly, so refusing to engage with that feature would be like playing a horror game with the lights on; you can still enjoy it, but you’ll be holding it back from reaching the height of its powers.
The journey each group goes on will feature similar puzzles, but very different experiences overall.
Big Walk’s incredible focus culminates in a final stretch of puzzles that encapsulates everything you’ll have seen and done until that point in a genuinely mind-blowing way. My kids and I spent over a dozen hours together solving many difficult puzzles and inventing a language which we often relied on, only for the final iteration of the game’s core concepts to be so slight in its adjustments yet so awesomely rewarding in its execution. It dared us to put together everything we’ve taught each other, recalling our entire journey.
I was utterly floored by the way this area masterfully fuses the game’s repeated actions of experimenting and exploring with the undercurrent of its emotional beats that purposely rise to the surface toward the very end of the game. I loved every second of Big Walk, and this final act cemented it as one of the best co-op games I’ve played in years.
As if that weren’t enough to land Big Walk as an obvious Game of the Year contender, the very last scene of the game sneak-attacked me with a surprisingly bittersweet moment that left me glossy-eyed. I wouldn’t dare spoil this part for you, but I’m sure it’ll have a similar effect even if you’re not playing with your kids. Big Walk takes fundamental and timeless video game concepts–obstacles and incentives for clearing them–and, through an intensely focused co-op experience, shapes them into something singularly rewarding, supremely mysterious, and totally unforgettable.
