// PC GAMER — GAMING
Big Walk review
A joyous jaunt through a gentle world full of thoughtfully-designed puzzles.
PC Gamer's got your back
Our experienced team dedicates many hours to every review, to really get to the heart of what matters most to you. Find out more about how we evaluate games and hardware.
What is it? A co-op (only) game about solving puzzles on an island with your pals.Release date: August 04, 2026Expect to pay: $20/£16Developer: House HousePublisher: PanicReviewed on: Intel i7 9700K, RTX 4070 Ti, 16GB RAMSteam Deck: VerifiedLink: Official site
Behind soundproof glass, Tyler is frantically signalling to me by wiggling both his arms over his head. I look over at Morgan, behind a different glass wall, who is holding a puzzle piece over his head—but he can't see Tyler's frenzied arm-swings. I repeat Tyler's gesture, wiggling both of my arms, and Morgan silently gets the message: Wrong piece. He drops it and picks up another.
What's interesting is that in the dozen hours we've been playing first-person co-op puzzle game Big Walk together, wiggling both arms over our heads has meant a number of things and "wrong" is just one of them. It's alternately meant "I've found something" or "come here" or simply "hooray!"
And as well as meaning "wrong," like it does now, it has also meant the complete opposite: "Correct!" That's the genius of Big Walk: it teaches you to communicate with your co-op partners so effectively that you can use the same gesture to mean a half-dozen different things, yet you'll almost always know exactly what your companions are saying. Even when you can't hear them.
Here's how chill the vibes are in Big Walk: there's a tutorial zone where you learn how to jump, crouch, and pick up and use objects, but at no point is there any indication you've finished the tutorial. There's no big arrow pointing at where to go next, or even when to go: we just sort of eventually wandered away from the tutorial and discovered a huge mysterious island waiting for us. No rush.
In our initial wandering we found a tall crane-like structure and eventually noticed it had a button on it, well out of reach. When we figured out how to push that button, we were rewarded with a small poof of confetti and a bulbous red object we decided to call a "nubbin" because it doesn't have a real name. We soon located a slot for that nubbin elsewhere, which led to more puzzles containing more nubbins.
Big Walk was communicating with us non-verbally: solve puzzles, collect nubbins, find more puzzles.
As chill as the world is, however, the limitations of Big Walk are more extreme than a lot of games. The nights are dark, much darker than many survival games, making it easy to get momentarily lost in tropical sprawl. You can carry only one object in your hands at a time, and even when you find storage solutions like backpacks, you need a friend to both attach it to your body and retrieve gear from it. Welcome to a world so dedicated to cooperation that you need a friend just to access your own inventory.