I used to be a big multiplayer guy. Whether it was trying to climb the ranks in Overwatch or collaborating with friends to escape Jason’s machete in Friday the 13th, I was constantly looking for new multiplayer experiences. That changed a few years ago after I became a dad though, and after a day of work and an evening of wrangling a toddler, my proverbial cup is nearly empty when it comes to social interactions and so I’ve naturally drifted back towards single player games.
Because of this, the fact that I’m utterly obsessed with Big Walk has completely caught me off guard. Despite that empty cup, I’m fully invested in this game that doesn’t just ask you to communicate with other players, it requires it. I went in expecting a fun “friendslop” game, but instead found possibly one of the most interesting, unique and enjoyable games I’ve ever played.
As the title suggests, this is a game all about going on a big walk. You and up to 11 friends can join the game, with progress saved to the hosts account, and your goal is to explore the world, complete puzzles, and collect doodads for reasons I’m going to try to avoid spoiling in this review.
That’s partially what makes this such a hard review to write, as so much of what I loved about Big Walk was the sense of discovery, and I’d hate to ruin that for everyone. You’re dropped without any explanation onto this huge, secret-packed island and just told to get on with it. There were multiple moments where I thought I finally understood the island, the layout and its contents, but then I’d round a corner and find something that changed the experience. It might just be a new tool that lets us approach situations differently, but often we’d make huge discoveries that provided new objectives or even changed the way I thought about the island as a whole.
Navigating the island is a joy, despite a few minor quirks with getting stuck on geometry. While your primary aim is to complete puzzles and collect items (we called them Kongs, as they look just like the dog toy), just getting from point A-to-B is a challenge in and of itself. There’s no HUD in Big Walk, barring an indicator to show what position your arms are in and to indicate if you’re wearing a backpack. There’s a map and compass, but they’re physical items that you need to carry, and you can only hold one item at any one time.
I quickly gravitated towards always carrying the map, which is weird as I distinctly remember getting hopelessly lost in the woods doing my Duke of Edinburgh hike at school. After half a dozen hours in Big Walk though I was like a bandy-legged Bear Grylls, able to orient myself using the map and my surroundings alone, easily able to get us from puzzle to puzzle. While I kept us moving in the right direction, Adam often chose to bring a torch along, as nights on the island are so dark that it’s almost difficult to move without a light source.
We all experimented with a mix of equipment though, including megaphones and walkie talkies to help overcome the difficulties of a very tight proximity chat range, binoculars for long distance viewing, and a flare gun because, to be honest, it’s just fun to shoot stuff. When you load into the game you always start back at the basecamp and all the gear you were carrying previously is there to collect, so gearing up became a nice little social activity at the start of each session, as we’d ask how each others day had been while strapping backpacks on and loading up tools.
The island itself is huge. There were several occasions where we looked around and realised how much further it opened up, and my mind got blown each time. It reminds me a lot of my 2025 GOTY, Baby Steps, as you’ve got a ginormous, somewhat realistic world, but it’s littered with huge structures decked out in primary colours, each indicating a point of interest you can’t help but gravitate towards. It looks like a giant toddler has been playing on the island and just left their toys scattered everywhere, with many puzzles made out of actual building blocks.
The game is built for more than two players, and you can’t progress by yourself, but often after everyone else logged off I’d just explore by myself, mooching around and building up my own mental map of puzzles and points of interest I’d bring the team back to next time we played. The sense of discovery on the island is outstanding, and with my map in hand I genuinely felt like an explorer trekking through a new and mysterious land.
Each point of interest is worth investigating too. Most of the time you’ll find a puzzle, but you soon learn that a certain type of structure contains backpacks or fannypacks that’ll let you carry more, so every time you see one you can’t help but beeline to it. Equally you’ll find new ways to move through the world, and while the route to unlock anything in the game is never explained in black and white, the game offers just enough guidance that none of us ever felt truly aimless. It’s a remarkable feat for any open world puzzle game, but doing that while balancing gameplay built for 2-12 players is jaw-dropping, and I can’t begin to fathom the amount of thought and planning that must have gone into Big Walk.
Every puzzle is a joy to solve, too. There’s a good variety, with them largely being bucketed into a number of different categories, but each individual puzzle in those categories feels unique and exciting. I don’t even really play puzzle games normally, but I was hungry for the next challenge after collecting every “Kong” we earnt. You have a few tools at your disposal, including your voices (limited by proximity range) and your arms that can be held up and/or out. Puzzles often involve trying to communicate with your team in trying circumstances, but there are challenges that involve platforming or coordination thrown in too, ensuring you never feel like you’re doing the same thing over and over.
You might walk into a room and see several lights on the floor, while outside the room are switches dotted around. You need to communicate to your team the order for them to hit the switches, but the moment you enter the room and shut the door, the order changes and you realise you’re in a soundproof room. Most puzzles started with us exploring all the mechanics together, getting an understanding and then agreeing on an approach. In this instance, I assigned all those switches an arm position, so for the leftmost switch I’d raise my left arm up high, etc. Then back in the booth I could mime the solution to Adam and Lyle like I was conducting an orchestra.
This was just one example of a puzzle, and while I don’t want to give away too many more, they’re all equally inventive. You learn how the rest of your team think and who’s better at certain challenges. There are a number of puzzles involving audio, which I was happy to let Adam and Steve tackle while I went cheered on from the sidelines.
When you spend 15 hours doing puzzles that often remove the sense of sight or sound between you and your teammates, you build up a shared, unspoken language and I think that’s part of what makes Big Walk so special. It’s the shared experience of finding, understanding, and solving these elaborate and varied puzzles. Every time we finished a puzzle and were waiting for the “Kong” to drop we’d be standing around, buzzing with glee and excitedly chattering about how we managed to solve it, or where we think we went wrong the first time. It’s a social experience I’ve never, ever had in a game before, and I can’t see it happening in the same way ever again.
Big Walk is a gorgeous game too. The island itself is surprisingly pretty, and there are some beautiful vistas and views to enjoy. It’s all made even better by the adorable duck creatures you play as, with their huge eyes and spaghetti-like limbs. I love how visually defined everything is, and without any formal descriptions it led to our group building up a shared language on how we referred to things. I can’t imagine the “Kongs” and fannypacks are officially called those names, but that was what we’ll forever know them as.
The audio is equally lovely and arguably plays an even more important role. As I mentioned, chat is proximity-based, and there’s quite a strict range in place which is also impacted by the direction you’re facing. If someone’s ahead of you and you’re both running forward, your voice might reach them but theirs might not get back to you. This extends to puzzles too, which will often push you to the edge of that range, forcing you to think about how you communicate as clearly as possible. Music is sparse, but rest spots are dotted around the map, each one featuring a funky bit of music that you can’t help but smile at.
Big Walk is a truly special experience. I can’t remember the last time either a multiplayer or a puzzle game captivated me so wholly, but I left every session wanting more. I wanted to figure out the answer to that one puzzle that outfoxed us, or how we got the train moving, or how we could unlock more shortcuts. Even at the time of writing, after rolling credits, Adam, Lyle, and I are still going back to the island, trying to solve one final mystery we can’t just leave alone. It became a group obsession that had us sharing theories and ideas like madmen, and if that’s not the sign of a special game then I don’t know what is.
