Big Walk Review - A Walker-Talker That Honks the Walk

Barely Magic Mike
24 hours ago
8 min read

https://youtu.be/U74THngZ19s?si=Y39zOuICi0mdn0ln

Does it walk the walk or is Big Walk all talk?

I wouldn't blame anyone for looking at Big Walk and being quite unsure of what it is. I know I felt that way for a while, and even upon grabbing the game for review, I had little clue what I was getting into. Some of you may know this about me already, but I'm not a big online multiplayer guy. Local multiplayer games with friends who are actually in the room? Sure, great, love it. Online multiplayer full of lobbies with ultra-competitive 12-year-olds shouting unspeakable things about my mother? No thanks, pass, I'd almost rather set myself on fire.

There is a nuanced middle ground between being a gaming loner and being pushed toward self-immolation, but it's not one I tend to explore much because I mostly play games to become immersed in them. And something about laughing with a friend while surviving a zombie apocalypse or fighting goblins or whatever just takes me out of that headspace. But Big Walk is a different beast - a multiplayer-mandatory cooperative game where the inclusion of your friends somehow adds immersion rather than taking it away. I haven't played anything like it before and have much to say about how great a time it has the potential to be for any friend group.

This is a truly unique gaming experience to say the least

But before I do, I really need to issue some warnings—not in a bad way, but more in a “things you should be well aware of going in” way. First of all: Big Walk is exclusively a cooperative online multiplayer game. Absolutely no part of it aside from the tiny opening hub area is remotely playable with only one player, and couch co-op is intentionally not included for reasons that will become clear shortly.

Second of all: While Big Walk is playable with a group of as few as 2 people or as many as 12, you'll want to keep your group as consistent as possible, and ensure that the same person is hosting every single game that group plays. The host player carries the save file, and while the puzzles are independent enough from one another that people can drop in and out at will without coming back confused, those who do drop out mid-session are likely to miss a chunk of content until they make their own save file. When starting a game, the host chooses a number of players, 2, 3, or 4+, which should be interpreted as the minimum number of players that should be in-game at all times. That means if you have 4 players in a session and you know 1 of them will need to drop halfway through, the host will want to select the 3-player option before starting the match or else be forced to return to the menu screen and reboot the session midway for some of the puzzles to remain playable.

Last of all, and this point is of utmost importance: Do NOT under any circumstances use Discord, phone, or any other external chat platform outside of the game's built-in chat features. Doing so will literally ruin the game, as many of its puzzles rely on communication between players being deliberately cut off and forcing them to strategize accordingly. If you're able to chat the whole time anyway, these puzzles will be completely trivialized and the entire selling point of the game's unique version of cooperation will be thoroughly broken. So just trust me on this one—in-game voice chat is absolutely mandatory. That about covers my words of warning! Let's go on a Big Walk.

Part of Big Walk’s charm, despite my typical hesitation with such games, is that it doesn't give you very much guidance at all. Outside of the basic controls, which are odd to get used to at first as you learn how to control each arm to point it, raise it, or pick up objects, virtually nothing gets explicitly communicated to you. In solo experiences that do the same thing, I'm often frustrated almost instantly. But the presence of others in Big Walk's large, cozy world makes the experience of exploring and figuring out where to go next fun in a way I rarely thought was possible.

Big Walk has LOTS of walking..Naturally.

It's worth spending some time in the hub area with your friends getting used to the controls before you set out. Picking up and interacting with items, picking up each other often against one another's will, and frantically pointing every which way for no specific reason are all fair game and resulted in plenty of laughs right from the get-go. Even the way your odd, rotund little bird people's beaks move while they're speaking feels goofy in a perfectly fitting way.

From the moment our group emerged from the hub area onto a cliff that looked out into the world, it was clear that Big Walk is full of little touches that make its world feel alive. Before making our way down the valley, we shouted into it only to hear our echoes reflected back at us a few seconds later. It may not have been a game-changing feature, but a small touch that told us how much developers valued immersion.

While plenty will facetiously point to Big Walk as a literal walking simulator, and in a sense they're not wrong (more on that later), it's primarily a puzzle game focused on forcing your group to cooperate in increasingly unique ways. Each puzzle gives you a pear-shaped object to carry back to a set of compartments they slot into, and doing so will unlock… Well… Okay, best to keep that part a secret for the sake of your own discovery. In any case, the puzzles pack significant variety from makeshift basketball games to being cut off in soundless booths and forced to communicate through gestures, to guiding one another all over an area of the map and communicating with walkie-talkies from a distance. It's all genuinely clever stuff and consistently surprised me with the unique challenges it threw at us, none the same as any other.

While most of the puzzles are close enough together within each section of the map, there should be little doubt that the walking between them will make up a substantial chunk of playtime. And that's generally okay, since this is a charming world to navigate full of interesting discoveries, and having your friends there along for the walk can certainly make it go faster. With that said, some aspects of Big Walk's design have a bit more friction than was perhaps intended.

For one, proximity voice chat, while mandatory for making the game's puzzles function as intended, gets quiet way too quickly as your friends step away from you. I don't feel like having my friend be 20 feet away should require me to practically shout at the top of my lungs to be heard, and accordingly, you'd think that kind of shouting would cover a distance much further than it actually does. Given the importance of communication, it felt like the game consistently forced us too close for comfort if we wanted to keep talking, and that's something I strongly hope gets ironed out with its first patch.

Another issue is that while Big Walk has no qualms in letting you go just about anywhere in its world that you want, some better gating of obstacles would've done wonders to avoid frustration. In sequences of light platforming where we had to jump up some rocks or make our way up after falling off a cliff into the ocean (yes, it happened, don't make fun of me), it's easy to feel stuck and at the mercy of whatever limited janky path you can find to make your way back. Even a menu option to teleport back to an actual path would help here, because the current way resulted in some unnecessary frustration and kept us wishing to be one of Skyrim’s horses that could scale a near-vertical cliff with ease.

Sticking together with the same group of friends is important

And I know the game is called Big Walk, but seriously, there is a LOT of walking around. And some of that adds to the charm, like when you need to split up and make plans for where to meet one another lest you get lost. Those moments felt like being temporarily teleported to the days without cell phones, where you couldn't instantly contact your friends at a moment's notice, and had to actually be where you said you'd be and when. But there were other times we just wished we could get to our destination faster rather than traversing on foot for such massive stretches. Don't get me wrong, some faster traversal options do show up eventually, but the problem remains to some degree nevertheless.

Lastly, as you might imagine from my opening warnings, having a consistent group of folks to play with can be a challenge, and it's unfortunate that someone has to miss out on content if they're not available at the same time as everyone else. I'm not sure there was any organic way around that, but it's something to keep in mind when getting a group together for this one. Depending on you and your friends, this could be as much as a 15-20 hour journey, and you'll want to make sure everyone can take in most of the experience.

Big Walk's presentation is what I'd call tastefully minimalist - there isn't a ton of environmental variety, and while its forests, beaches, and cliffs are quite cozy, it's hard to feel like there's anything especially eye-catching about them. I can't pretend to know the developer's intentions, but it almost feels like the lack of colorful, standout scenery is something of a feature to help spot your brightly-colored friends if they're lost somewhere in the distance. Again, that's speculation, and won't change the mind of anyone who simply doesn't like the generic way some areas look, but I'd say the visuals get the job done with little more or less to speak of about them. There's mostly not much ambient music either, but this is almost certainly a feature, as the game will have you come across radio stations you can tune your handheld radio to, ostensibly turning one of your friends into the DJ for your hike if you so choose.

Overall, Big Walk takes a big swing by creating a tight set of play conditions that require following some important rules to get the most out of it. That comes with a handful of caveats, but how important those are to you comes down to your own preferences and how much you like puzzles and just chilling in cozy environments with your friends. I can't say it's one of the best games I've played this year, but it's one of the most memorable, and a unique-enough time that even its hints of friction can hardly ruin what is overwhelmingly a fun and cleverly designed experience. Big Walk gets the silver genie lamp of approval.

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