Big Walk Review – A Walk To Remember

Reviewed on:
PC

Platform:
PlayStation 5, Switch 2, PC, Mac

Publisher:
Panic Inc.

Developer:
House House

Seeing a game lean as heavily into its core ideas as Big Walk does is rare. Untitled Goose Game studio House House built an experience filled with activities: puzzles, physics, basketball and music, lights and sounds, as well as secrets and foreboding premonitions of future discoveries. But the larger experience is mostly a lot of walking with your friends. And it’s a pretty good walk, too.

Big Walk requires co-op; puzzles adjust to lobby size, from two to three, to four-plus. You can have up to 12 players in a lobby – puzzles will still be sized for four players – but you cannot play alone. And while there’s no real way to enforce this approach, House House strongly encourages you to use proximity voice chat in-game, rather than hopping on a Discord call or playing local split-screen. These requirements can seem stringent compared to other co-op adventure games, and it makes coordinating a Big Walk session feel akin to setting up a board game night. But what you get in exchange for following those rules for play, though, is entirely worth it.

Each player gets their own orbish, bird-like in-game avatar. Tools littered in the tutorial area let you customize your character, learn the controls, and gradually understand the verbiage. You can gesture with your arms, such as lifting them up in the sky, pointing, or raising them out to the side. Sitting plops you down in place, or sends you sliding down a hill. There’s jumping, crouching, and even picking up items and kicking them like a field goal. Movement and interaction is delightfully tactile and involved, as you can talk with your hands and express thoughts with your in-game avatar body, literally pointing at things, waving, and doing the Rocky pose when you conquer a puzzle.

Distance reduces your voice volume, so walkie-talkies, radios, and even whiteboards became methods for long-distance communication for our group. A flashlight might be useless during the day, but at night you need one to navigate the darkness. Since you can initially only hold one thing in your hands at a time, equipment comes at a premium, so you make interesting decisions about what to take and leave behind. The limitations do prevent, however, carrying and using some of the more interesting and fun tools; the whiteboard is a really clever nonverbal tool to mess around with, for instance, but not as “effective” as a walkie-talkie or radio, which are abundant on the island. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t love writing “Kick Me” on a whiteboard and sticking it in my friend’s backpack as we explored.

Going anywhere takes time; not a gameplay resource or number on a meter, but just real-life time. This naturally leads to downtime which facilitates some of Big Walk’s best moments. Stumbling across a new puzzle room or gadget leads to hijinks. We argued over who got to hold the megaphone we’d just found, or go fumbling in the dark trying to find where we dropped a key item. If cartoon birds could ever re-enact Stand By Me in the Australian wilderness, it’d look a lot like Big Walk.

A north-star objective underpins all of this: small red objects, which look a little like those rubber Kong toys you fill with peanut butter for dogs, which we took to calling “gourds.” Usually, to solve these, we’d need to figure out the solution to an ambient puzzle, which had a delightful range including blindfolded obstacle courses, pitching machines, egg timers, mazes, lights and pictures, and many, many wooden blocks with symbols to hold up and nod or shake our heads at.

Big Walk loves to play with means of communication in these rooms too, and its best puzzles take full advantage of your buy-in to its requirements. Soundproof rooms forced our team to figure out how to communicate nonverbally. Shorthands evolved around specific puzzle pieces. Shouting “turn 10 degrees to your left and scooch forward” to my pal, as they’re wearing a giant helmet that muffles their voice and blocks their vision, was genuinely fun. These gourd puzzles feel like summer camp activities in the best ways.

Gourds can be placed in specific locations and, once enough have been placed, they open a secondary puzzle, which then unlocks a new feature on the island. I’m being intentionally vague because, after the initial tutorial, they become Big Walk’s big reveals. Each one introduces a new feature that recontextualizes a piece of the island, which is impactful and exciting.

If anything, that’s where Big Walk starts to slow its pace a bit. As we focused on unlocking more of the island, completing more puzzles, and figuring out what lay at the end of it all, the “walk” of it fell to the background. Walking itself is sometimes a bit too finicky; jumping up terrain and ledges, in particular, can be frustrating to manage. The expanse of the island closed in a bit, even as we uncovered more and more secrets, and found a larger post-credits puzzle chase meant for those who want more. I wanted more silly opportunities to play and find goofy levity in this large experience.

In the nine hours it took my crew of three to see the end of Big Walk, though, it felt like we had made a real journey together. We laughed a lot and came up with many absurd puzzle solutions that still somehow worked. Big Walk’s excellent finale effectively brought the message home: more than anything, this was our shared walk.

Sharing that journey is the point of Big Walk. It asks you to isolate, to put yourself in a siloed-off game station on proximity chat, so you can experience what it feels like to journey together in its virtual world. It provides tools for you to venture apart, to go vast distances, and still reconnect to gather your gourds and unlock more of the island. House House lays out all the ways your group could go, and lets you loose. Look for an ending, seek out puzzles, search for mysteries or climb for adventure; no matter what, you’re all going on a memorable walk together, and that’s a pretty good way to spend a few evenings together with friends.