Big Walk

My friend and I finished Big Walk recently, a game that I had seen a while back and thought “hey this looks kinda neat”. I was actually surprised to see it got as big as it was (though I’m basing that purely off the fact that it got a steam banner). I think I stumbled on it with the steam calendar feature…

In any case, much like the game implies, you (big) walk around an island that to my understanding is based off a real life national park and solve various puzzles/challenges. It’s a very, very, relaxed game and honestly quite nice. The scenery is pretty and there’s plenty of nice views along the way too.

It is also a game that is designed to be played with friends! I played it with just one other friend, but it supports up to 12 players which I thought was an interesting game choice. The game has multiple versions of the world, ranging from 2-4 players, and to my understanding puzzles scale. But as to HOW it scales, I’m not entirely sure and can only go off what a friend has told me.

Most puzzles usually range from some form of async puzzle (at least with 2 players) one person does one thing while another person does another. With multiple players it becomes one group doing one, and another group doing another. Fundamentally they are the same puzzles as far as I’m aware (though maybe one hint or to communicate might require the cooperation of more than one person).

But, that being said, I did enjoy the fact that I only had to play with one other person. Scheduling games with friends is hard so the flexibility and even the ability to switch the player count on the fly is a very neat feature and I think it’s cool that the devs did that. The “downside” of this is that I think fundamentally this means that all puzzles do have to be solvable across all counts of players, where it may have been cool to have some puzzles unique to larger groups (which, might be possible and I just haven’t heard of any yet).

So most of my comments is really on playing it with one other person. I do think that playing it with more people is its own set of fun, especially as it gets more chaotic. Being two players really let us focus on the actual puzzle aspect.

And the puzzles were mostly fun! Given the very simple controls, I think the game did an excellent job at presenting puzzles that required unique ways to communicate especially near the end. There’s definitely a lot of fun to be had at watching your friend flail around trying to communicate something, or even thinking “uh oh they don’t understand what I’m saying” too. With more friends I imagine this gets more chaotic and adds to that level of hilarity.

The other aspect that I really liked was how being split up felt. There’s a lot of fun to be had in the “hey where did my friend go” and trying to figure out a way to reunite. It actually reminded me a lot of in Houkago Kitaku Biyori (yes, I’m talking about manga again, sue me) they talk about how there’s a romance in not having each other’s contact information. And honestly? I really felt it in this game. Which does lead me to one minor critique.

I thought the walkie talkies as an item were a bit too strong. Now granted I could be wrong and maybe they do limit this (my friend and I self limited using them), but I think the ability to two way communicate in some puzzles defeated the purpose of finding unique ways to communicate in each puzzle. I do think that they’re great in the overworld, but I think bringing items into each puzzle could lead to falling into a pattern of “oh, we’ll just use the same signals as before”.

There’s a few ways that I think would be fun to limit it, stuff like maybe around the map there could be stationary megaphones so you could have one way loud communication, but not two way (without using something else like a laser pointer or flare). But anyways, I’m not the game designer and this is just my personal opinion.

Speaking of puzzles though, I do wish there were a few more unique ways of communication. Specifically what I mean is that puzzles usually varied down to “how do I communicate X with my friend”, and assuming there’s no speaker/voice, you’d usually use some form of gestures or charades. However, there were only so many things you “needed” to communicate, though some were very interesting. In particular one of the post-game puzzles I had a lot of fun with. But to get back to what I mean, I wish there was more stuff like the teapot room, where one person could leave a message and then the other person would have to decrypt it or try to understand it in some way. Some puzzles also shared similar styles of solutions that I think could’ve been mixed up a bit more (notable some of the “communicate which button to press to your partner!” ones were quite similar).

In fact thinking back on the puzzles, another one I really liked was the ASMR one. I really liked the hands off approach to all the puzzles, and it was up to the player to figure out what the goal of the puzzle is and to solve it.

Now, there are some “puzzles” that I heavily did dislike though. Specifically the ones that were not really puzzles. There was one end game one that really was just heavy labour and it was not enjoyable. It was tedious and unlike the therapy room ones where that felt like a nice way to relax/talk with your friends, I didn’t have the same enjoyment. Also there were a few that felt more like “find this random thing on the map”, some of which I thought were well done since they required splitting up and communicating, but some of them (read: one in particular) felt like “okay, do you remember where these were? grab them all and come back”. The reason why I wasn’t a big fan of that one is because technically that one was entirely soloable, and not needing of a coop partner. A second person just made it faster. Again, not many, but I wasn’t a big fan of these ones.

One other cool thing of the game that I wanted to mention though was that the game felt very flexible in the sense that there’s a LOT you can do that isn’t even just playing the game. Of course there’s the hanging out with friends aspect, but there’s more fun to be had with your friends than just that!

For example, one fond memory I had was my friend and to leave for a bit. So I told them I would kidnap them, set them down, and meet them back at the main base. It was funny to think of where I would put them to make it difficult to come back. It made me think, wow, this could be an entire game within the game. Set someone down within a certain radius and see how long it takes for them to get back. Switch roles, whoever’s faster wins, or something along those lines.

There’s also the obvious stuff like hide and seek, tag, racing, etc. Could even do capture the flag! There’s a whole plethora of fun games within the game itself that I think as a base, this game is very cool. Now as to whether I’d be able to gather enough friends to do any of those with is a different story.

This is all to say, I think this is a really good coop game. For a very long time, I’ve been growing kind of tired of coop games that are run/session styled. This is obviously an extension of my general fatigue with roguelike/session based games in general, but I really like coop games that are well, an actual game experience together. I’ve played some with friends but unfortunately I find some of them also don’t exactly play well either (I’ve been playing borderlands 3 with a group of friends and that game is… okay to me at best).

I understand the desire for those kinds of “hey we can do one run” games because they’re easy to pick up and easy to put down, and more importantly they don’t need to be scheduled consistently with friends. I’ve been there having tried scheduling DND sessions or anything consistent with a large group of friends, especially with varying timezones. In fact I’m part of the problem since I’ve had a dwindling supply of freetime taking up various other hobbies.

Anyways, I appreciate the risk the devs took with this kind of game, and I think it paid off, at least for me. It’s definitely not a game for everyone. But I think as a good bonding experience (I honestly think this as a family game would be incredibly fun depending on family), this is a fantastic time.