// PC GAMER — GAMING
Big Walk is a new co-op puzzle game classic
Find some friends to take walk with in one of the best puzzle games in recent memory.
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A grave error: During one Big Walk puzzle, I flailed my arms around to signal "Hooray, you picked up the correct puzzle piece" to my puzzle-solving partner, and he immediately dropped it on the floor and picked up a different, not-correct piece. Oh no.
Big Walk is a puzzle-adventure game for up to 12 players (but three or four seems ideal, realistically) that insists players use its built-in proximity chat rather than sitting in a Discord channel, for the most part so that it can decide when you aren't allowed to talk. In this case, we were separated by soundproof glass, so my panicked voice could not be heard when I said, "No no, you had the right piece before!"
I had no one to blame for this mixup but myself: Not more than 10 minutes ago, I'd explicitly designated flailing one's arms around as the signal for "no, not that one," even though we'd also been celebrating every solved puzzle with arm flailing for hours by that point.
With no good and sensible way to use Big Walk's limited gesturing to communicate an idea as complex as "I screwed up and did the wrong gesture and you actually had the right piece already," I resorted to vigorously shaking my camera left and right, flailing my arms some more, pointing at the piece that had just been dropped, and jumping up and down.
It's amazing how complex of an idea can be communicated, or at least implied given the context, with so little, because my meaning was picked up immediately. Maybe the signal for "no" shouldn't be the same as the signal for "yay," we agreed after the puzzle was done.
Part of the puzzle of Big Walk is finding the puzzles. You and your adventuring party explore a mysterious island, finding and solving puzzles to collect nubbins that look like those red rubber Kong dog toys. A mysterious black orb beckons you from beyond a wall, and the only way to reach it is to fill towers with nubbins.
Once you've found a puzzle, it's generally easy to figure out what it wants you to do (but not always). Many are simple symbol matching games: One player can see which symbols go where, and has to communicate that to players who, because they're behind soundproof glass or half-a-mile away on a hill, cannot hear them.