Often my job involves playing games before they come out. Sometimes, this means I’ll come away feeling like I’ve just played the next big thing. That’s one of the most exciting parts of my job, really, and it happened yesterday; I’m certain Big Walk is the next big thing.
Developed by Untitled Goose Game’s House House, Big Walk is a two- to 12-player co-op game in which you explore a huge island full of puzzles and secrets. Playing in first-person as vaguely human-like, customizable avatars, you and your group will solve all sorts of puzzles in a game that is perhaps most reminiscent of Peak, but ultimately does a lot of things in its own special way.
Big Walk drops you onto its island setting with virtually no hand-holding. There’s a colorful gymnasium area you’ll start in that tutorializes the game’s mechanics to whatever extent you want to learn them. You can interact with buttons, pick up objects, hold them over your head, kick them away, perform a number of hand signals, and…that’s about it. Whenever you’re ready, you can leave this area and begin exploring a world without quest markers.
In their place, you’ll see hints of landmarks you may want to investigate–a colorful structure downhill, a train track built along a mountainside, a footbridge built over the ocean. What awaits you is completely unknown, but the game’s nonlinear path and gentle nudges make magic happen.
Sometimes while exploring, you’ll bump into progress-stoppers. In a demo my kids and I played together, we came upon a machine that seemed inoperable until we inserted four somewhat egg-shaped objects into their designated spots. We concluded these items behaved like batteries, and that once all four were inserted, the nearby key would become obtainable. So we set out to find these “eggy things,” as we took to calling them during our demo, and to figure out where to bring the key.
In one tucked-away corner of what was effectively the tutorial island, we found a button. Pressing it turned on a red light far away, and using a nearby monocular showed us that the same button also opened a glass case containing our first eggy thing. With that in mind, my son set off to retrieve it as darkness fell over the island, and I kept pressing the button to signal where he should go. Since he was far away, we no longer had the benefit of proximity chat, a feature that has made games like Big Walk so immersive and fun recently. The same is true of Big Walk.
My son grabbed the eggy thing and danced with it, as my daughter and I took turns looking through the monocular, thrilled to have gotten over our first obstacle. We celebrated and reconvened together as a trio, in search of our next eggy thing. Big Walk’s way of telling you basically nothing means every triumph feels even greater. You aren’t beating missions; you’re happening upon discoveries.
It’s the same unguided approach an open-world RPG so often demonstrates and benefits from, but remolded into a co-op world where physics, proximity chat, and a bit of comical failure–or even some playful undermining of your group’s goals–are key ingredients. Without a doubt, this is going to be the next great hangout game.
I don’t want to spoil any other puzzles, so instead I’ll say it’s a game designed on two simple pillars: walking and talking, routinely challenging you to adapt when things like your freedom of movement, ability to communicate, and the physical space in which you stand are altered. Each problem demands a solution, and finding one is incredibly rewarding, but the stumbles along the way are their own kind of highlight.
The smaller puzzles we solved for each eggy thing eventually led to a bigger puzzle. That then opened up more of the island, including a tutorial finish line where we could write messages on whiteboards we could carry, perhaps to be used in the future to communicate across great distances. Puzzles also scale for each team size, meaning a full-size group of 12 may benefit from sending out smaller squads in different directions, but will also likely need to convene as one big party to collect more eggy things and get past some of the game’s obstacles, as they’ll take on different shapes than what we saw as a trio.
Unlike a lot of the best friendslop games, Big Walk has a definitive ending, which is said to be reachable in about 12-20 hours. That seems to translate to dozens of puzzles to solve, many paths to explore, and countless ways to goof off. It comes out on August 4 for PC, PS5, and Switch 2, and I would bet all of my eggy things that it goes viral. My kids and I had a blast with it, and we left our demo so excited to get back to the full game to see what awaits us farther down the path of our big walk.
