Big Walk is a multiplayer puzzle game. It's an open-world co-op game where you explore an island and successfully complete challenges with friends using in-game proximity voice chat. It is a "friendslop" game, insomuch as that means a relatively low-lift game that you play with friends featuring sometimes-wacky physics. Big Walk is a new game from House House, creator of the infamously beloved Untitled Goose Game.
Big Walk is a COVID game.
Let me explain. Big Walk isn't about illness or pandemics, unless I've really misunderstood something, but it is thematically and mechanically a direct result of COVID. There's a direct line between the two, and it's not even subtext. You don't even have to take my word for it.
"End of 2020 was when we wrapped up Goose Game and we'd been obviously cooped up in our house under lockdowns and not spending time with each other," says House House developer Nico Disseldorp when I ask why the team decided to stake its future on a game where you walk around an unnamed island for indeterminate reasons. "We'd gone from working on a video game, standing behind each other and pointing at the computer and hanging out every day to only really spending time with each other in video games. And that was the time in the week where we felt most connected to each other."
"So we said," continues Disseldorp, "'Well, let's make one of these video games that we can play together. It'll be fun for us, and we'll get to spend time with each other inside the video game we're making, but let's make one where it's all about the feeling of togetherness. So rather than we're going to be hanging out together while doing something else, it's like the video game will be about hanging out together, and we'll figure out what that means as we go along.'"
Walker-talker man
You could more broadly associate the rise of "friendslop" games with post-COVID development, and people certainly have. It doesn't exactly take a genius to answer the question of: why are so many video games where you just sort of hang out and complete tasks with friends, regardless of distance, coming out and resonating? Why, perhaps it was the sudden and stark isolation of quarantine and distancing that went on for months and years, starving people of social interaction globally!
Trying to talk about Big Walk's mechanics and how they grow out of this fertile soil is difficult in part because it's a puzzle game. If I say too much, I've basically given away the puzzle. But it's also difficult in precisely the way that makes it a COVID game. More than anything else, Big Walk is about learning to communicate effectively and collaborate despite numerous obstacles deliberately frustrating or even entirely preventing both.
Because the various items and puzzles have no names or designations, any given group of players has to start from scratch on describing, expressing, and instructing. How do you indicate "yes" from a distance if someone can't hear you? What does "no" look like? What do you call the little… gourd-looking key items? (Every session I've ever played ended up calling these "babies," by the way. Your mileage may vary.) This is, you'll be shocked to learn, entirely deliberate on the part of the developer.
"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," says Disseldorp, "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," adds 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."
Art is reflective of the time in which it was made, regardless of intent, but I'd argue that Big Walk is absolutely intentional. If you work together, regardless of how isolating the distance and difficulty to communicate or how big the problem (or walk), you can come to a solution together. There is, I think, a lesson somewhere in there.
Big Walk is currently available on PC, PS5, and Nintendo Switch 2. If you're looking for something in a similar vein, be sure to check out our ranking of the best co-op games.
