Big Walk could be your next Peak-like obsession, but fair warning: it's almost too easy to kick things and you're going to do it

What are the playable characters in Big Walk, the upcoming social multiplayer walker-talker game from developer House House of Untitled Goose Game fame? Having played a couple of hours at a recent hands-on in-person preview, I'm still unsure. Ants? Birds? Humans? They've got distorted heads with bulbous protrusions that get larger when speaking, spindly limbs, and what I can only describe as a snowman-style body of multiple orbs. It's unclear, and House House isn't interested in clarifying.

"That's for you to decide," says House House developer Nico Disseldorp when I ask. "We've kind of left a lot of built-in ambiguity – lots of the items, the characters, lots of the spaces in the world, they're deliberately a bit difficult to describe, and that's part of the game is for you to figure out what language you want to use with your friends."

"This isn't a game where you can just not describe them," continues Disseldorp. "There's so much teamwork that you will need to kind of build that shared language. But through doing that, you take ownership and build a shared understanding of the game together."

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"You make your own little vernacular that you kind of refer to things by, and you have your own little story," adds House House developer Stuart Gillespie-Cook. "Plus, we wanted to really frustrate anyone who was making a wiki of the game. Gonna make that job as hard as possible."

"The blank at the blank is the blank," says Disseldorp, laughing. "That's the ideal wiki entry for Big Walk."

Hold and shake

Mechanically, Big Walk is fairly simple. You can point, you can jump, you can crouch, you can run, and you can interact with objects – with ways to combine all of the above into different actions – while traversing an outdoor space populated with various structures and puzzles. "Interact" here is broad and can mean pushing buttons, shaking an item in your hands, or reeling your foot back to give a nice big kick to whatever you're holding. Sometimes what you punt might have been the key to unlock the next step of a puzzle. Sometimes that something goes flying off somewhere you can't locate it again. (There's a Lost & Found in the starting area where such things respawn.)

"I do think our impulse the second we get a character in a game is just to make them as expressive as possible," says Gillespie-Cook. "Where so much of the focus of this game is looking at each other and interacting with each other, you kind of do want your little puppet guy to be as expressive as possible."

"A pretty big philosophy of ours is like, there's no dance emote button or whatever," continues Gillespie-Cook. "All the dancing you can do comes from your own movements. There's weird little combinations of things you can do to make your character move around in the way you want."

"We let you layer your actions, rather than having a bunch of discrete moves," adds Disseldorp. "It's kind of like, 'OK, you can do everything in the game with your hands above your head. What makes sense for that? What does that mean if you're holding something? What does that mean if you're not holding something?'"

So, for example, you can hold an object in Big Walk, but there's no inventory screen so that everyone can see what you have. This also means you're pretty much relegated to holding a single thing at a time. But is that the most important part of holding anything? Of course not.

"The most important verb when you're holding something is just to hold it above your head to show someone else," says Gillespie-Cook. "It's like, 'Check me out.'" The two of them refer to this as a "Look What I Found" button, which is born out of the natural instinct of playing games together.

Look what I found

While Big Walk and its focus on social interaction might at first blush seem to be pretty far afield from House House's previous title, the spirit of the goose is alive and well here. For example, there's a heavy emphasis on shenaniganery. There are challenges to be solved, but also, you can just… not do that. There's nothing stopping you from running around and playing tag or hiding key items (sometimes literally) around the world. There's no traditional online matchmaking, however, so if you're out there griefing others it'll be people you know. Then again, one person's grief is another person's pleasure, right?

Not that my time with Big Walk, between 45 minutes to an hour and change from start to finish, was anything to do with "grief." Though I'd only known one of the other three playing with me at the beginning, we quickly gelled and were soon crawling across the landscape, solving puzzles and shouting "key, key, KEY, KEY, KEY." I can only imagine the chaos of having up to 12 players doing similar, though many hands may make light work, and tackling multiple challenges simultaneously could make solutions simpler. If I were a betting man, however, I'd wager that another eight players in our game would have simply meant a louder "key" chorus.

Really, the only fundamental change to Big Walk depending on the number of players is the scale of challenges – and even then, not all of them. It's a pretty "light touch," according to House House, and there's plenty where nothing really changes at all. For example, if you have to form a chain to carry something… the chain's just longer. One early challenge, as another example, tops out at four buttons and any additional players are just there for moral support.

"The biggest thing we wanted to make sure of is you only need one other person to play through the whole game," says Gillespie-Cook. "We make sure we support two players, then three players, and then four plus we just kind of categorize as its own big thing. Every challenge might have a distinct role for different players to take on, and we found that once you get up to like four people, people start making their own roles anyway. So there's no point shoehorning them into things."

"If you played the two-player version of a challenge, and your friends played the three-player or the four-player, and you were talking about it, it wouldn't be immediately obvious that you're having different experiences," adds Disseldorp.

"A lot of the fun of designing those challenges to capture that same feeling – no matter how many people you play it with, you've had the same feeling of coordination that you've had and as other groups," continues Gillespie-Cook.

Proximity chat isn't quite working as intended with my setup, or so it seems. I've been invited to the Panic office in Portland, Oregon to play in a room specifically designed to have four-player Big Walk sessions together. It's a bit cobbled together given the intent is to play Big Walk online, but it works.

I can only hear one or two people, and not consistently, but there's no time to stop and troubleshoot because they're already moving away through the brush and I can hear them echoing in the physical room we're sharing anyway – not something every player will experience, to be sure, but then the specific circumstances of my playthrough are something outside the norm anyway.

Panic CEO Cabel Sasser excitedly explains the technical aspects and we're greeted by a scripted intro that's projected onto the walls. It's a bit much, but in a good way. The four pods, equipped with Mac Minis and monitors and headsets, have their own accompanying light show. Sasser later confirms Big Walk is running 1080p, 30fps here and also shows us a really stylish broom for reasons of which I am sworn to secrecy. (The public will soon get to find out, however, as Panic is opening the room up for scheduled previews.)

Despite the proximity chat snafu, I have a good time and am generally able to keep up just fine, but it does inspire me to then ask House House directly: why the emphasis on proximity chat at all?

"We would play a lot of these games during lockdown," says Gillespie-Cook, having previously explained that Big Walk started life around the end of 2020, "and quite often get frustrated."

"Our go-to anecdote has been playing a big session of Red Dead with a bunch of different people," he continues, "and having one group over here robbing a train and one group over here exploring a cave, and because we're all just on a Discord voice call, the things were happening simultaneously, and you didn't really feel as connected to your your immediate party."

"Someone would say, 'Look over here,' and you're like, 'Where?' And then you realize, 'Oh, they're on the train and I'm in the cave. I shouldn't really be hearing this player,'" adds Disseldorp. "It's only confusing, and you're kind of yelling at each other rather than talking to each other when that sort of thing happens. Proximity voice chat just gives you that natural ability to only hear from people who are in the same space as you and focusing on the same things you are."

"It both gives you this immediate focus of, I'm sharing this experience with my friends, but then later, when the two groups recombine, there's this great moment of storytelling where you get to live vicariously through their story of the train robbery, or whatever," continues Gillespie-Cook.

"We don't have a train robbery, just to be clear," adds Disseldorp with a laugh. "That's the game we were playing. There's a train, but I don't think you rob it – I mean, you could. That's a challenge for your readers, I guess: can they do a train robbery in Big Walk?"

I bet you could do a train robbery in Big Walk. If nothing else, I'd love to see you try – and to hold something above my head or kick something off a cliff, maybe both, while you do.

Big Walk is set to release later this year for PS5 and PC with cross-play. While you wait, be sure to check out our ranking of the best co-op games.