Big Walk Review - A Road Worth Traveling – Global exclusive news in one place

If you’ve ever played a co-op game before in the current gaming market, odds are you’ve come across “friendslop.” While this term typically refers to games that tend to use asset flips and market themselves as “fun to play with friends,” quality control isn’t always a priority. With developer House House, though, they took their time to develop Big Walk into somewhat of a prestige entry in the new deluge of co-op video games.

Joining a group of at least one other friend, you’ll explore an odd unknown world, solve puzzles together, and trot around to your heart’s content. While it’s a very relaxing game, there’s a ton of complexity beneath the surface, especially in how voice chat works. If you’ve been looking for a new co-op game to play, this might be it.

It’s hard to pin down Big Walk‘s core focus because it has a lot going on. It’s part hangout simulator, part adventure game, and part puzzler. I don’t want to play up or downplay any particular element of this trifecta, since you can enjoy Big Walk in a variety of ways.

To be clear, Big Walk does have objectives to complete and an ending. If you want to walk straight from puzzle to puzzle and essentially speedrun the game, you can. You’ll find a roughly 10-to-20-hour adventure awaiting you, though it may take longer if you stop to smell the roses (and you absolutely should).

Think of it as an open-world escape room without a timer. Puzzles can be done at your pace, and in some cases, if something has the group stumped, you can wander around and find something else to do before eventually going back. Some tools you find may help you in your cause, or you can solve each puzzle organically.

It’s a fantastic core loop, because the co-op angle really helps everything fall into place. If you have no idea where to go next or how to tackle a puzzle, there are other people working together to try and achieve the same goal. As the puzzles ramp up, mechanics rarely ever stay the same or wear out their welcome. Exploration and unique puzzle designs go hand in hand to ensure that Big Walk never becomes a chore.

You might remember House House from 2019’s Untitled Goose Game, which took the world by storm. That same level of cute irreverence is still present in Big Walk, as the adorable duck-like creatures have a ton of personality.

Avatars can walk, run, sit, duck, lift/kick things, and naturally emote using the bumpers/triggers, which control your arms. You can even lift each other and stack on top, Mario 2 style, which plays into some platforming and puzzle solving. Avatar animations are varied yet clear, which helps during a co-op game where direct communication might not always be an option.

As House House notes, it’s best to play Big Walk over in-game voice, so you have to deal with the limitations of proximity chat. Some puzzles are designed with limited voice chat in mind, and you can actually lose party members as you explore.

Big Walk is open-ended in a way that I really appreciate. Part of the fun is trying to figure out “meeting places” if the group splits up, so you can meet back together organically. In my group, we even started naming specific landmarks with our own terminology, or describing how to reach each other in broad terms (“follow the river to the end”).

We essentially created our own language from within the game, which is a testament to how deep it is. Again, while it bills itself as a relaxing hangout game, there’s a lot more to it than that, but you can take it slowly and explore, which several members of my group did, before rushing back to tell everyone what they found.

There are tools to assist in finding each other, like binoculars, flare guns, and whiteboards that you can write on to show off a text message from afar. Or, you can simply ignore all these; the choice is yours.

OK, so it’s important to talk about a few provisos with Big Walk, because it is ostensibly a co-op-only game. When you host a lobby, you’ll pick between options that support two to 12 players. Note that there’s no solo play, as the game was not designed for it, since the puzzles will not work properly. While there is a world where a solo mode could be feasible, you should keep that in mind.

Save data will also be directly linked to the host, so you’ll need to have the same person host each session to continue properly. This is a hurdle that might annoy some prospective fans, especially if you need to meet during irregular hours to continue the same save file.

While cross-platform play is a boon at launch, you should take this into consideration. It’s a bit of give and take, because the team over at House House already did a fantastic job of pushing the boundaries of online play in a relaxing puzzle game.

Even so, those hang-ups won’t apply to everyone. I had a blast running through Big Walk with a group of three, and the joy of discovering what was around the corner was ever-present.