Big Walk: social gaming done right

I have long been resistant to so-called “friendslop” — games that are designed to primarily or even exclusively be played in cooperation with other people. There are numerous reasons for this.

Chief among them is, quite simply, the fact that I have never really felt like I have many (or any) people to play them with, as most of them require a certain amount of commitment, even if it’s for only an hour or two at a time. And, as time goes on and we all get older, people seem less and less likely to make time for their friends.

The other part of it is that, as an autistic person, I find the prospect of an activity primarily based on socialising and communicating somewhat daunting. Not to such a degree that I don’t want to do it — in fact, as a follow-on from the above, I have actually found myself craving it somewhat as I have felt increasingly abandoned by people I once considered close friends — but rather it is simply something that I need to expend a fair amount of mental energy doing.

Last night I tried Big Walk for the first time. And it was a truly excellent experience. Let’s talk about that after the jump.

I’d been skeptical of Big Walk since its review embargo first dropped and the same people who had been banging on about Blue Prince were all enthusing in a very similar way about it. And I ended up fucking hating Blue Prince, so I wasn’t in a particular hurry to follow the recommendations of these people again — particularly as I didn’t anticipate that I would have anyone to play Big Walk with anyway.

However, two things made me interested to give it a try.

The first of these was this video from the folks at Giant Bomb, which made me piss myself laughing. (Not literally. But it is fucking funny.)

The second was a surprise opportunity that arose when some people that I wouldn’t have expected to be into this sort of thing indicated that they were, in fact, interested — and so we established a mutually convenient time and all gathered together to play. We ended up playing for six hours non-stop, which I think is about as ringing an endorsement as you can get from a group of people who really knew nothing about this game going into it.

For the unfamiliar, Big Walk casts you in the role of some surreal little blob creatures with glowing eyes and prominent noses that are also their mouths. This simplistic character design is deliberate, so that you can see at a glance who is who (by the colour each character is, which can be customised early in the experience) and which way they are facing (by the direction their prominent nosemouth is pointing).

There is absolutely no narrative setup given at the start of the game, and no indication of what you are supposed to be doing — though it does, at least, start you off in a tutorial area that introduces you to all the main moves you’ll need throughout the game: walking, running, crouching, sitting, sliding, jumping, plus various ways you can manipulate both your arms to point and gesture, pick up and use objects, and drop, kick or throw these objects around.

Once you and your group are good and ready, you head out through the door that invites you to “enjoy your Big Walk” and then, after the open world tradition of emerging from an enclosed space into a sprawling landscape that extends off to the horizon in all directions, you’re left to it.

At no point does Big Walk give you explicit instructions, so it’s up to you to determine what your actual goal is. Before long, this will become apparent, however; at various points around the landscape, there are receptacles for unnamed collectible objects (which our group ended up calling “Kongs” due to their resemblance to chewable dog toys) that, when filled, will dispense an oversized key. This key must then be “cut” at a number of stations scattered around nearby — with each station pointing in the direction of the next once it has been used.

Finally, the key must be inserted somewhere in order to… do something. Exactly what happens when you insert the key depends on which part of the map you’re working on; in the opening section of the game, which is mostly enclosed in a small valley to provide a self-contained introduction to what you will be doing for the rest of the game, the key lowers a bridge allowing you to access the rest of the island on which the game unfolds, but elsewhere you’ll find the keys opening up new areas or activating means of transportation such as a ski lift.

So how do you acquire these “Kongs”? By solving puzzles — although the first puzzle in each instance is simply finding the puzzles to solve. In order to do this, you’ll need to survey the landscape and look for structures that appear unnatural and out of place amid the otherwise natural surroundings. Once you reach one of these, you will almost certainly find a Kong clamped tightly in a vice, and some sort of challenge to complete in order to release it.

As with everything else in Big Walk, none of these challenges present you with explicit instructions, so part of each puzzle is simply determining what is expected of you and how to interact with the things provided to you. There’s a huge mix of different puzzle types across the game; some are very straightforward traversal challenges that task you with reaching something that would, under normal circumstances, be hard to get to; some are more complex tasks with multiple steps. Pretty much all of them require cooperation between everyone playing in order to successfully complete them.

Big Walk tweaks its experience based on whether you are playing with two, three or four-plus players. We had a group of four or five at all times during our six-hour session, and all the puzzles felt like everyone had something worthwhile to do, whether that was flinging a Pomodoro timer across the landscape in order to put it on a pedestal before it exploded, passing a heavy object between ourselves to get it to a destination, sending people off to distant pedestals in order to gesture at those of us watching through telescopes, watching various lights reveal patterns and counting the totals, and myriad others besides.

Each of the puzzles we encountered was initially bewildering, but in collaboration with each other, we were able to determine what we were supposed to do, then execute a plan in order to complete it. That is not, however, to say that plans always went entirely smoothly.

One of the most interesting things about Big Walk is that it insists you only use its in-game communication facility to talk to one another, whether that is through proximity voice chat, or text chat that appears floating over a player’s head (and thus is only visible from roughly the same range that proximity voice chat is audible). Proximity voice chat is also affected by the environment, so your voice will carry further or echo in some environments; conversely, some walled-off sections of certain puzzles are completely soundproofed, meaning you’ll need to find alternative ways of communicating.

If, for some reason, you need to split up in order to achieve something, you will have to find various ways of communicating at a distance, too. There are some walkie-talkies scattered around the island, as well as radio base stations that can broadcast to walkie-talkies from a static location, but if you’re carrying a walkie-talkie your hands are full so you can’t carry anything else.

Object manipulation and inventory management is another particularly well-crafted part of Big Walk. Initially, your group’s collective inventory is equal to what each person can hold in their hands — so if you have four people, you can carry four objects at once, including the all-important Kongs. This means that you will sometimes need to leave items behind and come back later for them; thankfully, a “scope”-like device you can acquire early on (and at various other opportunities during your explorations) causes interactive objects to “glow”, letting you easily find things that you have misplaced, accidentally dropped or thrown off into the distance because you thought it might be amusing.

However, this doesn’t remain a hard limit; at various structures, clearly visible from a distance, you are able to acquire backpacks, which allow anyone wearing them to carry an extra object on their back. The twist is that they can’t put things in their own backpack or access the object on their back themselves, so cooperation is required to both load them up and unload them at the object’s destination. Once you have everyone equipped with a backpack, though, you have effectively doubled your group’s collective inventory space.

Because your inventory is divided between all the participants, however, you have to think carefully any time you might need to split up. If someone wanders off and they’re the only one carrying a walkie-talkie, you’re not going to be able to get back in touch with them unless you find a radio station — and it’s very easy to lose people if they get out of immediate visual and audible range.

However, it’s not a complete lost cause, because there are various ways in which you can non-verbally indicate your location. Numerous landmarks around the island allow you to shoot up flares, for example, and there are lots of glowing lantern balls you can find, pick up, move around and turn on and off in order to attract attention. Essentially, you have to think about what you might do if you were actually in this situation; how would you attract the attention of the people you have become separated from if you’re not entirely sure where they are in relation to you?

As you play, your group will determine how your Big Walk experience unfolds, because while there are obvious “gates” to progress that allow you to unlock shortcuts between areas of the island, there’s also no prescribed route you have to take in order to complete all the game’s challenges. Indeed, even after six hours of play, it’s not entirely clear what the end goal actually is, other than “collect Kongs, get keys, activate things” — but the experience remained compelling nonetheless; a reminder that a good video game can be a good video game simply by being enjoyable to play. There doesn’t need to be a complex narrative attached — and in some circumstances, it would actually be a detriment.

One of the most powerful things about the game as a whole is that it deliberately provides an impressively immense draw distance, to such a degree that you can pretty much always just about see your friends from afar, even if they are a long distance away, assuming they are within line of sight. The characters’ glowing eyes play an important part in this; more often than not, it is the vaguest hint of those eyes, barely a few pixels in size, moving around in the distance that will tip you off to where they are — particularly when it gets dark as part of the island’s heavily accelerated day-night cycle.

The other thing about the game’s massive draw distance is that it means you can stand atop a high location, survey the landscape and make a plan as to where you might want to head next.

The distinctly unnatural shapes of the structures that house the Kong puzzles are designed to stand out from the foliage and rocks of the island, so you can always see them from a distance, and from there, determine what your next move might be. In this sense, it actually reminds me quite a bit of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, and how, in that game, you come across adventures completely organically, simply by wandering around, thinking “ooh, that looks interesting” and investigating accordingly.

I was surprised and greatly impressed by quite how fun Big Walk actually is. As I say, the gushing praise that was being heaped upon it around the time its review embargo expired reminded me of Blue Prince to a worrying degree — and thus I was concerned that the entire experience would be far too abstract and difficult to enjoy for me personally. And I guess in some ways Big Walk is a pretty abstract experience, given its complete lack of narrative and explicit instructions; however, the difference is that the cooperative, communicative element means that you’re not tackling these tasks alone, and thus you have other people to bounce ideas off and work together with in order to solve the challenges ahead of you.

There’s no getting away from the fact that in order to enjoy Big Walk, you need at least one person who is willing to play it with you — and for some, that may feel like an insurmountable obstacle for one reason or another. There is, unfortunately, no easy way around that… aside from just asking. I certainly thought it would be a problem for me, but I was grateful some friends decided to give it a chance — and we were all extremely pleasantly surprised by quite how compelling an experience it ended up being.

I somehow doubt that it would be quite as enjoyable if played with unknown randos — unless you’re the sort of generally affable person who can easily get along, bond and cooperate with strangers, which I am not — and the game isn’t set up with any sort of “matchmaking” system anyway. But when played as intended, it is a thoroughly compelling and unusual take on the adventure game, and a great way to spend a few hours with friends.

Calling it “friendslop” feels somehow disrespectful in a way; this is a game that has absolutely been crafted with care and attention as an enjoyable activity to take on with people whose company you enjoy. So if you have the opportunity to do so, I encourage you to take it; I’m already looking forward to our next jaunt into the wilds, and curious to see what we’ll discover next.

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More about Big Walk

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Want more Pete? Check my personal blog I’m Not Doctor Who, and my YouTube channel ThisIsPete. If you enjoy what you read here, please consider buying me a coffee.

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