Big Walk is a game about hanging out with your friends, exploring a large open world, and solving escape-room-style puzzles. It must be played with at least 2 players and supports up to 12 in a single session. As House House’s helpful FAQ explains, when you host a session, you select a version of the world made for 2, 3, or 4+ players. The developers advise regarding this number as the “minimum number of players who will be participating, rather than the maximum.” When we played, we picked a 3-player map, because we knew that some of our sessions would only have 3 players. But that didn’t make our 4-player sessions any less engaging. The game doesn’t support online matchmaking or couch coop, so you do need to know other people who own the game. But there is crossplay, so players using different platforms (Steam, Switch 2, and PlayStation 5) can play together.
For this review, we decided to walk readers through our individual experiences playing together. Despite Big Walk being a strictly cooperative game, how we each interacted and interpreted it varied as we took on different roles and saw the world through different eyes.
Review written by Jacob Price, Elizabeth Hambleton, Nina Penner, and Jesse Hazel-Greer.
We can’t all agree on what we’d call it, but Big Walk is definitely not friendslop. Not that friendslop games are necessarily bad—all four of us are fans of Aggro Crab’s Peak—but there’s a marked difference between something like Lethal Company and what Big Walk is doing. Friendslop games are defined by their quick production cycle and straightforward, yet endlessly replayable, game design. They soak up social media feeds with clippable gags full of laughter and friends shooting the breeze, usually broadcasted for an audience to be in on the joke.
Big Walk’s design is far too refined and intimate in comparison. The solutions to the group-based puzzles require troubleshooting with limited communication, inspiring epiphanies rather than jokes. The radius for proximity chat is uncharacteristically small, and after several hours of playtime the concept of personal space goes out the window. It’s easy enough to clip Big Walk. There is a dedicated button to drop-kick things and plenty of high cliffs, so the math is there for viral moments. However, the more I played, the less I kept a finger hovering over the screenshot button on my controller.
But the parallels are still there. It’s got enough silliness to keep you or an audience engaged as your team stumbles or steamrolls forward on the nameless island. The world itself is a hybrid of primary-colored tinkertoys and lushly forested mountains, and the playable characters are shaped like ring-stacking toys for infants. Superficially, it could pass as one of the many friendslop games that regularly dominate the top sellers list on Steam.
But we aren’t satisfied with that genre tag. We tried to come up with an alternative including the right antonym for “slop”: something like friendsavoirfare, friendsation, friendgem, or friendslaaay. House House describes Big Walk as a “cooperative online walker-talker,” and John from Gaming in the Wild proposed “hangout game” in his August look-ahead video. Rather than get bogged down in creating a new genre tag, Big Walk puts its money where its title is and walks a big walk, leaving most of its peers well behind.
Elizabeth Hambleton
It reminded me of the giddiness of going to a playground as a kid. In the first moment of the game, you walk forward out of a dark tunnel and stand on the precipice of a brightly colored playplace. It’s the tutorial and lobby while you wait for your friends. Even in this tutorial spot, Jesse and I were just mucking around when I accidentally yeeted my cowbell behind a giant black orb. It was in attempting to retrieve it that we learned we can pick each other up and jump while stacked, giving enough height to reach hard-to-reach ledges or tops of giant black orbs. I fetched my cowbell and resumed clanging until Jacob appeared.
We exited the indoor area, and it happened to be night. We fumbled about in the dark until we found a glowing orb we could take with us. The whole game seems to be centered around orbs. The characters are three orbs stacked; the puzzle prizes are usually two orbs smooshed together (they look like a Kong dog toy); and the ambient lanterns around the area are shaped like those giant seated bouncers with the handle. There’s definitely a theme of a rubber ball here for everything that is game-related. The background setting stands out starkly as realistic trees, rocks, water, and so on, so it is always clear what is simply background versus what is interactable and part of the playspace. It really does feel like moving through the world as a wide-eyed kid again. Remember when you would see sidewalks as a platforming challenge or bike racks as a mini jungle gym? It feels like putting on a pair of glasses that lets me see things as playable in that childlike way.
The game is all about moments of silliness and whimsy in a beautiful Edenic world. For example, in Big Walk there is a day/night cycle, and I love watching the sunrises and sunsets. I had my character sit on a stool to watch the (incredibly photorealistic) sunrise. I had heard from another content creator that she’d had a moving experience watching the sunrise with her team, and I was thinking, “This is it. My team and I are going to have this magical, beautiful moment on these funny little stools overlooking the water.” Five seconds later, Jesse and Jacob had gotten bored and dramatically thrown themselves into the ocean. I hadn’t laughed that hard in weeks! It was a very different moment than I was expecting, but it was magical nonetheless just for how hard I was laughing and how present I felt.
I think that’s the magic of Big Walk: the balance of paidic and ludic play (sorry not sorry for getting academic for a second). Ludic play involves win/loss conditions, whereas paidic play is more like a sandbox. In Big Walk, we fluidly moved between paidic and ludic play. We would be noodling about in an area, maybe exploring or maybe just chatting, and then we would see A Puzzle™️ and run towards it and switch into strategizing mode. There’s a great variety of puzzles scattered around the island of Big Walk. It’s kind of like the shrines in Breath of the Wild. Most involve cooperation and communication to achieve. Our team never bickered about how to accomplish a puzzle or task—we just worked together to figure it out with some of the slickest communication I have ever had with a group. Big Walk seemed to innately foster this kind of easy communication and fluidity between play styles that felt seamless.
Also worth noting is how well this game runs! My gaming PC is out of commission for now, and I was very concerned about how I would play this game with the team. For our first session, I borrowed a friend’s gaming PC, and I used keyboard & mouse. Everything went swimmingly, so for the second session we all agreed I would use my mid-tier laptop (NOT a gaming laptop, but it does have a dedicated graphics card) just to see how it goes. And the verdict is I barely noticed a difference. I dropped all the graphics settings to medium, so everything was a little less sharp and the distant objects would appear closer, but everything ran perfectly. I didn’t notice frame drops. I didn’t experience lag. Usually when I’m running 3D games, it sounds like the computer is about to launch into space, but the fan was no more stressed than when playing Minesweeper. Also, it feels great to play on keyboard & mouse. The team at House House clearly made some excellent decisions in optimization and prioritization of resources, and I am duly impressed! Laptop users of the world, rejoice!
Nina Penner
Big Walk is definitely not friendslop in the sense of something slapped together to make a buck. There is care and craft in every aspect of its design, from the landscapes modeled on Wilsons Promontory National Park in Victoria, Australia, to the immersive soundscapes created by Em Halberstadt at A Shell in the Pit. And yet, Big Walk does share a few things in common with games like Peak. The fun players have and the stories they tell about their adventures are more of their own making than events scripted by the developers. And how much you value your time with Big Walk will greatly depend on the value you place on spending time with the people you’re playing with.
The developers know this. They called their game Big Walk, not Big-Brain Puzzles. In our last session, we spent nearly an hour getting to our intended destination after setting off in the wrong direction, getting separated after falling down a cliff, getting lost in the dark, then mistaking one giant yellow edifice for the one we were intending to find. Mechanisms that, at first blush, appear to be for fast travel end up not being fast at all. These affordances make Big Walk a game that’s perfect for a weekly catch-up with some friends who live in different cities. For me, it was an opportunity to get to know some of my fellow SMG writers.
My experience playing Big Walk ranged from the sublime to the ridiculous. One moment I’m watching the sun rise from the ski lift while catching up with Elizabeth. Next, I’m watching my fellow travelers bobbing in the ocean, flailing their limbs. I think it was Jesse who suggested attempting to test how far the game would allow us to swim into the ocean. Pretty far, it turns out, and as a bonus, a group of plastic kids’ toys attempting to swim looks about as ridiculous as you can imagine.
For the most part, I felt Big Walk’s puzzles offered just the right amount of challenge. It’s not The Talos Principle. It’s not even Portal. But it also doesn’t contain the sort of “puzzles” common to so-called walking simulators (I play plenty of these, so no offense is intended). The solution is not immediately obvious. There were even some we abandoned in favor of lower-hanging fruit. The satisfaction of figuring out a way to communicate information that initially appeared to be inexpressible given the tools at hand offers immense satisfaction of a kind distinct from most puzzle games. It’s not “I’m a genius”; it’s “we did it together.”
House House made the bold but, I think, wise choice of having all music (by afsfx or Sam Gill and Luke Neher) be diegetic or part of the virtual world. During your travels, you may come across radios that can pick up music broadcast by any radio stations you have activated. In order to listen to music away from the station, you need to take a radio with you. Thus, having music is a choice, and packing a radio (as Elizabeth did on our gondola ride) may mean leaving behind an item with more utility, like a flashlight. I found the spotlight on sound design grounded me in the virtual space and allowed me to focus on communicating with other players.
Jacob Price
I’ve got a few hours under my belt, and I am feeling a bit bolder. I’m trekking across a hillside sprinkled with playhouses that look cut from rubber with Nina and Elizabeth. Jesse’s gone, taking one of the “kongs” (our loving name for a key shaped like the dog chew toy) back to a “water tower.” We’ve fallen into a cadence and have an idea of how Big Walk works. Get kongs, usually five; unlock a key (oddly enough); cut that key; and see what game-changing reward awaits you.
One of the trio leads us through the night to a building with two entrances blocked by turnstiles. We’ve found two hand radios, which make life infinitely easier considering how narrow the default proximity chat is. Well, the turnstiles force you to drop all items. I’m not quite devastated, but I feel like my cheat sheet has been stripped from me before a test.
And it’s certainly a difficulty check. Maybe that’s not quite right. It’s better to say “intelligence check” in Big Walk. Elizabeth and I enter on one side while Nina goes in the other. Like many puzzles scattered across the island, the logic centers on limited communication. We can see each other, but not hear anything we say. The loss of the hand radios stings a bit more now.
On our side, we have a wall of symbols in fixed spots. We see that Nina has the same symbols, but on wooden pegs that can be inserted into different slots. Ah, so we have to visually tell her where to place things. We get it. I stand there, conferencing with Elizabeth on how we tell Nina where things go. She grabs a symbol and looks our direction, seemingly in the know of what our plan is. Then it hits me: I’m Amy Adams from Arrival. We’re speaking a new language.
I direct the arms of my black and raspberry colored low-poly duck-like avatar in an awkward symphony. T-pose, right arm waving, furious nodding, crouching, and left arm pointing. Time unravels, and I see all instances simultaneously. Time is no longer linear but like a rubber ball with immaculate audio design, bouncing in all directions from a single, casual toss.
Nina somehow interprets my movements. They’re not graceful, but they work. When the confetti pops and the kong is released from the vise, I don’t only feel a little bolder, but I also stand a little taller too.
Jesse Hazel-Greer
I once read an interview with a neuroscientist deconstructing the idea of instinct. He pointed out that most assumptions people have about the genetic basis of dog behaviors, for instance, are unsupported by science and even demonstrably wrong. He proposed an alternate heuristic: animals, guided by their genetic dispositions, learn how to behave based on the way their physical bodies interact with and grow within their environments.
When I first stepped into the lobby of Big Walk, I was greeted by my colleague, Elizabeth Hambleton, who immediately lifted me into the air and proceeded to chase me around the brightly colored rec room shaking a loud cowbell for five minutes while I pushed various buttons and waved my arms in the air. In these goofy segmented bodies with noodley limbs and the limited environmental interactions available to us, I can’t imagine anything that would have felt more natural.
The gameworld’s visual approach has the novel juxtaposition of realistic wilderness and a newly built polychromatic playground of geometric shapes: a nature reserve meets oversized foam blocks. The landscape is big enough that you can end up separated or lost or—in the case of, uh, one of us—alone and stuck in the deep dark woods all night. The only sounds apart from your nearby friends’ voices are those of a hike in the woods, sprinkled with occasional diegetic music in places.
Exploration is key because there is no clear path from A to B—only doors with locks and keys hidden behind scattered riddles, and that’s the thing about Big Walk that truly caught me by surprise: the puzzles. The game has some hella good puzzles, with cryptic clues, careful observation, out-of-the-box thinking, and a sizable helping of coordination and collaboration.
There is plenty to do in Big Walk, so much that even after several sessions the four of us remain far from the game’s elusive conclusion, but what truly elevates the game is that one doesn’t actually need to do anything at all. No time limits or hazards constrain exploration. No imperative keeps a player from sitting on a bench alongside their playfellows while watching the sun set; no directive keeps one from heedlessly diving into the ocean at the bottom of the rocky slope.
