Big Walk isn’t afraid to separate you and your friends in its vast island map full of switchbacks, valleys, gorgeous views, and puzzles. When the sun sets it gets almost pitch-black out, and you can only see the saucer-like whites of your friends’ eyes as blips in the darkness while you stumble along, unless someone remembered to bring a flashlight. These moments of fear and uncertainty stuck out to me just as much as the fun puzzling as I set off exploring the new game from House House, who rose to notoriety with their 2020 indie hit Untitled Goose Game.

My friend Max who I’ve played a lot with has remarked multiple times that the world feels like a huge playground, and I totally agree. Building on that thought, when nightfall comes, Big Walk evokes the feeling of when you return to your childhood playground after hours years later, and see it in an eerie new light. Getting between puzzles can be just as fun as the puzzles themselves, though I found the upward bouldering to be occasionally cumbersome and difficult to parse in a way that was noticeably less smooth than how the rest of the game feels to play.

Even though no danger can befall you, I’d start scrambling and calling out if my buds got too far ahead, or one of their voices suddenly dropped out of my range. I have only played in groups of three and four so far, with the maximum number of players being a beefy twelve, so the creepy vibes may dissipate when more cooks enter the kitchen. But especially when you don’t know the island so well early on, getting lost in the dark can be paralyzing, but you always seem to make it to something interesting even if you’re just flailing around.

Grab your mics, nerds!

Big Walk is the latest in a growing subgenre of indie multiplayer games like Peak, Content Warning, and Lethal Company, and one of my favorite parts of these games has been their use of proximity voice chat as a central element, making communication more complicated than just chatting on an external call. Some have started using the term “friendslop” to describe these games. That term leaves a bad taste in my mouth, and I don’t think it’s a positive or helpful descriptor of Big Walk or the previous games listed. You play as a group of strange bipedal bird-like guys with huge eyes and nubby mouths that do a goofy warbling animation when their player speaks, and have little knowledge as to why you’re exploring this island and collecting red gourd-shaped objects clamped tight until you do whatever the puzzle demands.

Elements like survival stats (managing hunger, thirst, temperature, etc), time limits and point thresholds, or threats that harm the player can be great for adding tension in these kinds of games, but House House presents a stripped back experience with Big Walk, which allowed me and my group to focus on the best part: shenanigans and silly miscommunications with friends. Puzzles range from simpler challenges like tossing balls in a hoop, to ones that may send you on a wild goose chase across the island, or demand you split up across long distances, communicating with arm gestures or items you’ve brought like walkie-talkies or a laser pointer. Sometimes you’ll enter a puzzle structure and get separated by a barrier like a cutesy Saw trap.

So far, I’ve been delighted by the puzzling, and I don’t want to discuss them too deeply. Stumbling upon one of these strange brightly colored structures in the darkness and figuring the concept out with your group is such a great feeling, and I don’t want to compromise that in this piece if you have yet to play the game. We haven’t seen them all by any means, but I’m really enjoying the puzzle language that’s developing as we start noticing similar devices and props we’ve used previously, and appreciate how your approaches to puzzles can change based on whatever items you’ve brought along.

Yeeting yourselves down mountains beats the upward slog

It feels so good to jump from high places in this game. While it can occasionally lead to separation if you don’t all jump at once, and you drop held items when you fall from too high up, booty-bouncing down huge mountains with no fall damage never gets old. You can also slide by sitting on slopes, and it’s been pretty impossible for me to not let out a gleeful “weeeee!” most times I do it. Getting up high is hugely important in Big Walk to get your bearings in navigation, or try to track down your crew after a separation, but it was intentionally less easy to go up the mountains than it felt to go down.

I certainly need to unlearn some bad habits I got from games like Skyrim, where I’d ignore intended paths and smash the jump button to force my character up sheer cliffs like an armored, janky Alex Honnold. But even when going up paths that seemed to be the expected route, I’d frequently lose momentum, having to reverse and leap multiple times to conquer very basic rock step paths. Like the rest of the game, though, clambering can be a group activity. We formed a couple of impromptu assembly lines in steep areas where you’d pick up the person behind you and deposit them higher up.

The friction in traversal is certainly important for the mood of the game. When you see a huge mountain looming in front of you, it’s a genuinely intimidating sight and takes some strategizing to approach. Taking a step back to assess your options will get you there way more often than just smashing the space bar with your face buried in the rock, but there were definitely times where my experience suffered from this clumsy climbing. Even with those headaches, my frustration would quickly melt away once we reached another puzzle or a spectacular view.

‘Big Walk’ is an immaculate multiplayer experience

While this won’t be as inherently replayable as other co op hits like Peak, which is a live experience that updates the mountain you and friends scale intermittently, I’ve had some fun going back to bits of Big Walk with friends who hopped in later and needed to learn the ropes on a fresh save. It’s not as magical as the discovery in your first run, but it’s still surprisingly satisfying to see new players get comfortable, and they can potentially surprise you with a puzzle solution your last group never considered.

Big Walk has been so impressively laid out to grow chaos and memorable moments out of your specific group dynamic as you explore the island, and have it all feel so organic. We all probably have one friend that we try to keep the flare gun or megaphone away from as much as possible, and the game lets you snatch anything out of each other’s grips, which feeds into even more shenanigans and tomfoolery, aka the good stuff. Even though you will wander off away from each other, intentionally or not, the game still manages to bring you together again with its thoughtful level design and other mechanisms you’ll uncover.

The game’s masterful silliness pairs beautifully with the moments of serenity that come naturally in the world, and the genuine creepy vibes that still bubble up even as you get more familiar with the environment. This experience is really at its most potent in action, and you’ll be doing yourself a disservice if you watch most of the puzzles in a play through online. Even if you have to be the annoying one in your group chat recommending this weird game, it’s hard for me to picture a nerdy group of friends that wouldn’t get some enjoyment out of Big Walk.