Big Walk Review

House House trades action and competition for exploration, communication, and puzzles, creating a relaxed multiplayer adventure where your friends become part of the experience.

Big Walk is the kind of game that takes a little time to explain because it doesn't immediately fit into a familiar category. Developed by House House, the Australian studio best known for Untitled Goose Game, it is a first-person cooperative multiplayer adventure built around exploration, puzzles, communication, and simply spending time with your friends. 

At first glance, calling Big Walk a walking simulator would not be entirely wrong, but it misses the most important part of the experience. The game is about cooperation, and you and your friends need to determine what the world is asking of you rather than constantly following objectives or waypoints. 

That approach feels very different from more structured cooperative adventures such as It Takes Two or Split Fiction. 

Those games regularly push you toward cinematic moments, scripted sequences, and mechanics specifically designed around cooperation. Big Walk is much more relaxed. You might notice a strange building, a tower in the distance, an unusual machine, or something else that looks compelling, point toward it, and simply decide that this is where the group should head next.

There is no traditional plot constantly pushing you forward, and that is largely intentional. Your journey is shaped by the places you discover and the situations you create with your fellow players. The world contains strange characters, unusual locations, puzzles, and objects, but the game does not spend its time delivering a heavily scripted story.

Instead, your group gradually creates its own stories through exploration. Getting separated from your friends, finding a strange object, accidentally disrupting a puzzle, or discovering an unexpected route can become more memorable than a traditional cutscene. 

The lack of direction is one of the game's strongest ideas. The game doesn't have a traditional minimap that constantly tells you where the next objective is, so you have to pay attention to your surroundings. If something looks particularly intriguing in the distance, you can walk toward it and investigate.

The puzzles are where this cooperative design becomes most obvious. Big Walk includes challenges that can require two players, larger groups, or sometimes just one person, but the important part is that many puzzles are designed around communication rather than simply making things easier when friends are present. 

One of the earliest examples involves players climbing on top of one another to reach an objective. It’s a simple idea, but it works well as an introduction because you naturally start experimenting with how to grab and move each other. Other puzzles require one player to activate a mechanism while another reaches an otherwise inaccessible area. 

The mini-golf challenge is a particularly effective example of how Big Walk promotes teamwork without constantly telling you what to do. 

Technically, one person can move a heavy ball, but it takes a long time to do it alone. If you have only a few players, you can bounce the ball back and forth between them and slowly walk it toward the hole. The puzzle itself seems to imply that cooperation is the obvious answer.

Some challenges are intentionally designed to separate players, making communication all the more vital. You might discover yourself unable to hear your teammates normally, forcing you to use gestures, lights, fireworks, walkie-talkies, radios, or other objects to communicate. 

The proximity voice chat reinforces that idea. Your friends become quieter as they move farther away, so you cannot always rely on shouting across the entire map. If someone gets separated, you may need to find a radio, use a walkie-talkie, fire a flare, or send some other visual signal to show where you are. 

The communication restrictions can occasionally be frustrating, particularly because the puzzles depend so heavily on coordination. But the idea is clever in that it makes communication another problem to solve. Instead of simply talking to your friends about the solution from anywhere on the map, you have to consider how you can actually reach them and explain what you have discovered.

Big Walk also makes cooperation feel natural by rarely punishing failure in a serious way. There is no health bar to worry about, no major enemy waiting to kill you, and no strict timer constantly forcing the group forward. If someone needs help moving an object, you can simply help them. 

This scenario changes the kind of skills that matter. You do not need to be especially good at combat or have perfect reflexes. Curiosity, patience, communication, and the ability to notice something your friends missed are much more valuable. Sometimes the person who solves a puzzle is simply the one who happened to look in the right place.

The interaction system also contributes to the puzzle design. You can pick up and throw objects and interact with tools such as binoculars, lights, radios, and walkie-talkies. But you usually only have one thing at a time, so carrying a lot of things can turn into a group activity.

A puzzle may need multiple objects to be moved from different locations, requiring players to divide responsibilities. 

One person can pick up one item, another can pick up a second, and all of a sudden the solution becomes less about solving the puzzle itself and more about coordinating where everyone needs to go. They’re actually good little restrictions because they get players working together without requiring a complex progression system.

Another big component of Big Walk is the enormous world. This can be either a blessing or a curse. There's a lot of walking between activities, so whether you like that depends on what you want from the game. If you enjoy having time to talk with friends, look around, and take in the scenery, the slower pace can be relaxing.

There is much backtracking. You may reach an area only to discover that you need an item you left behind, requiring the entire party to walk back and retrieve it. Moving across uneven terrain can also sometimes feel awkward. 

A more generous approach to getting players back on the correct path could have reduced some of these frustrations. At the same time, the slower traversal is part of what gives Big Walk its personality. Walking across the landscape with friends, deciding where to meet, splitting up to search for something, and then trying to find one another again can create moments.

The day-and-night cycle adds to this experience. Once darkness arrives, visibility becomes more limited, and finding your friends can become a small adventure in itself. A light moving across a distant landscape or a flare appearing somewhere in the darkness can suddenly become important because you genuinely need those signals to figure out where your teammates are.

There is no traditional combat system here, and that is one of the game's defining characteristics. You are not fighting enemies or building a character around damage, weapons, or combat abilities. The closest thing to a mechanical challenge is instead interacting with the environment and solving its puzzles.

There’s really no combat to speak of, meaning there’s no traditional XP grinding system to drive the experience. 

In Big Walk, you don't have to fight enemies over and over again to gain experience, unlock better abilities, or improve your character's statistics. Progression is not numerical but through exploration and puzzle-solving. That keeps the focus on the cooperative journey, not making the game a grind.

The game was designed to be played without a traditional progression. The usual reward for solving a puzzle is the satisfaction of figuring it out and seeing what the world has waiting beyond. There is no stopping and grinding for experience before trying the next challenge, so the whole group can naturally progress at their own pace.

Big Walk’s visuals follow the same simple philosophy as its gameplay. The environments are intentionally kept non-photorealistic and minimalist, with forests, beaches, cliffs, and other natural areas creating a warm atmosphere. The restrained art direction can make the scenery a bit repetitive, but the overall style provides the game with a distinctive personality.

The colorful player characters are a nice contrast to the more muted environments, which helps when someone is separated from the group. They also add to the game's humor with their rounded designs and exaggerated moves. 

The sound design is similarly understated. Big Walk doesn’t rely on a constant soundtrack or dramatic music to tell you how to feel; instead, it lets environmental sounds and player communication take center stage. Radios and other devices can introduce music into the journey, allowing your group to create its own soundtrack as you explore.

That approach also fits House's sense of humor. Just as Untitled Goose Game created comedy through player interactions, Big Walk lets the players create most of the hilarious moments themselves. Someone can accidentally throw an object at another player, misunderstand an instruction, wander off in the wrong direction, or completely disrupt a puzzle.

There are some important limitations, though. 

Big Walk is fundamentally designed around multiplayer, meaning it is not a traditional single-player experience. Outside of the opening area, much of the content relies on having other people around. That makes sense considering how heavily the game is built around cooperation.

Maintaining that group can become difficult because progression is tied to the host's save. It takes some planning to keep everyone on the same page with high player turnover. When the proximity chat is quiet, especially when you're close enough to want to talk but far enough away that your voice is hard to hear. 

Even with those issues, Big Walk's commitment to its idea is impressive. The game does not simply tell you to cooperate through a series of prompts. It builds cooperation into the puzzles, communication system, exploration, item management, and even the way you find your friends. 

Big Walk is ultimately a game where the people you play with become just as important as the game itself. The walk between puzzles matters because you are talking along the way. Getting lost matters because someone has to figure out where everyone went. Failing a puzzle matters because the group has to experiment again. 

That also means Big Walk will not appeal to everyone. 

Its slow pace, long stretches of walking, occasional movement frustrations, limited visual variety, and reliance on a consistent group are genuine drawbacks. Anyone looking for fast-paced cooperative action may find it too quiet. But if you want a relaxed multiplayer experience where cooperation actually shapes how you play, there is something special here.

House House has created a cooperative adventure that values giving players room to experiment. You are not constantly pushed toward the next cinematic moment or told exactly what to do. Instead, you are given a large world, a collection of strange puzzles, a few useful tools, and a group of friends, and then left to figure out what happens next.

Big Walk works because, at its heart, it understands that multiplayer games don’t need to be competitive, combative, or constantly active to be enjoyable. The best moments come from communication, exploration, mistakes, and unforeseen circumstances that arise when a group of people works together to solve problems.