Big Walk Review in Progress – Small talk while you walk

I like going for a walk. Admittedly I don’t go out into the wilderness much, generally getting my steps in by meandering up and over the hills to do a spot of food shopping and listen to podcasts. But if I’m not pressed for time or don’t need to grab that one ingredient I forgot for dinner, it’s nice to at least take a detour through the park, stretch my legs with my better half on the weekends, and see how the ducks are getting on. Big Walk is less about getting a pint of milk and much more about spending time together, whether it’s you and another, or enough people to have a miniature rave by the sea.

There was a time when I wondered if Big Walk’s lunch had been stolen. Just a week after its gameplay reveal at Summer Game Fest last June, Peak was released and, to my mind at least, brought inevitable comparisons. Peak was also a game about getting through a strange land. You had various tools for orienteering, a quirky visual style to the characters, and you could muck around with friends online. But if Peak is a prime example of ‘friendslop’ – and I mean that in the best possible way – then Big Walk is more like ‘friend-haute-couture’.

The opening hours are a gradual build up as you get used to House House’s approach to this co-op world. Starting off in a large building, a bunch of interactive elements and explainer signs help you learn the ropes or quickly get a newcomer up to speed. The chaotic potential of co-op immediately emerges when someone finds the cowbells and starts making a racket, but you also learn how to hold out your arms in various ways – point, out to the side or up – along with the basics of using, holding items and throwing things, picking up other people, and the like.

Then, you head down the steps of this mono-coloured building and out into the much more realistic open world. Where do you go? What do you do? In the day, you’ll spot the bright primary colour structures down in the valley, but there’s a good chance that you’ve frittered away the in-game hours and it’s the dead of night with just a single distant light source as a hint for where you might go.

A few things quickly become clear (especially at night). The proximity chat is very, very proximate. Voice really isn’t that high in the audio mix and the drop off is pretty stark, so even 10m of separation might break your connection to someone else as you’re jogging through the world. Perhaps you got a little stuck on a rock? Went round a blind corner? Thought you were taking a shortcut? It’s so easy to get separated by sound and you can’t really shout for help unless you have a megaphone.

And you probably won’t have a megaphone, because you can only carry one thing at a time. Need light at night? One of you better have a flashlight or one of the many orbs you can find and turn on throughout the world. Need to check where you are? I hope someone’s been carrying a map with them for the past 15 minutes. Want to explore separately? Well, you’re just going to have a walkie-talkie in hand and nothing else, then. Eventually you can get backpacks and hip holsters, but these aren’t things you can access yourself, you need to have someone else attach and grab things from your backpack.

Big Walk supports as few as two players and as many as twelve, with bespoke puzzle adjustments made for two, three and four+ players. With a larger group, and especially as you explore more of the world and get more items, you can much more easily hand out jobs and roles. Maybe you’ll have a designated map man unfurling the overly large fold out and then holding it up for everyone else to view, while someone’s got a laser pointer to make a presentation. Task one person with having the lights for nighttime, a walkie-talkie guy to shout when people get separated, someone to carry the coordinates box around to find secrets, and so on.

When you’re down to two people, you definitely feel the limitations of what you can hold, but then it’s probably a less rambunctious atmosphere as you plan and head out to where you need to go next.

Starting each session from the initial home base, you’ll gradually start to open up new paths to help you get to different areas more quickly. There’s various towers housing empty containers, which you’ll need to fill with the pear-shaped rewards you get for completing puzzles. Completing puzzles and reaching new places helps you turn on a monorail, open giant doors, and gradually peel back some of the secrets that this game holds.

Oh, the puzzles. These are a great mix of simple tasks, like getting a timer ball back to the launcher in time or pressing a bunch of buttons all at once. Some are more obscure, such as explaining which lights are active from inside a soundproof room or matching invisible shapes to a code phrase using a revealing telescope. The way that these puzzles are dotted around reminds me a little of The Witness, but there’s something more abstracted here, and there’s certainly a lot more variety.

Big Walk just exudes a charm and an attention to detail that feels rare. There’s a subtlety and very deliberate nature to it when ‘friendslop’ embraces the, well…. the sloppiness. It’s things like the quirky animation as a key or reward is ejected, the way that a disconnected player is now motionless with crossed out eyes, how each session takes you back to the start but brings all the items you were carrying at the end of the last session to a little pedestal for you to retrieve. There’s a nice little gearing up ritual at the start of a session because of this, grabbing all your tools, checking the map and planning where to go, then setting out on a little adventure.

There are also annoyances, though. As binding as it is to force you to stick together, the proximity chat really does feel too short, for one thing, perhaps lacking some kind of limited shout so you can call out a little further if you’re getting separated – shouting louder in real life doesn’t really work. It can also be a bit finicky clambering over rocks and scenery, especially when holding something in front of your, so I’ve defaulted to holding stuff over my head. It’s definitely far too easy to clip the shoulder buttons on the Switch 2 and drop, activate or throw whatever you’re holding. Say goodbye to that megaphone you’ve just launched into the sea, buddy.

I also feel that you really do want a larger group to play, if you possibly can. Over the weekend, we’ve only managed to play in twos and threes and just lacking the number of hands for getting around is limiting, even if the puzzles themselves are self-contained and scalable. It’s a great boon that this is in August’s PlayStation Plus Monthly Games selection, so you can hop in with more people.

Big Walk is something special. We’ve got a good bit more exploring to do before delivering a final verdict, with larger groups and to more corners of the island, but this is a game with a tone and feel all of its own. It’s full of little touches and moments that make it stand out, capturing that feeling of exploration, discovery and team work in its own particular and peculiar way.

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