// THE VERGE — MOBILE & WEB
Big Walk is like co-op Breath of the Wild
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You explore a vast world and solve tricky puzzles — but in Big Walk, you figure it all out with your friends.
You explore a vast world and solve tricky puzzles — but in Big Walk, you figure it all out with your friends.
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Untitled Goose Game is a tough act to follow. It was a silly experience that captured what I imagine it would feel like to be a sentient goose: a lot of waddling, a lot of honking, and a lot of shenanigans. That’s why Big Walk, the next game from Goose Game developer House House, feels like a radical and unexpected departure. Instead of playing as a goose terrorizing a small village, Big Walk is a co-op multiplayer game where you explore a large island and have to work together to solve puzzles. I’ve been playing Big Walk as a duo with my wife, and while we’re not done yet, we’ve spent more than 13 hours exploring the island and solving problems together. Big Walk may be a comparatively small game, but the experience of making unexpected discoveries can make it feel like a grand adventure in the Zelda mold.
The name Big Walk suggests a game about walking — and there is indeed much walking — but it’s really more about talking. Outside of some brief signage about the controls, the game doesn’t give you explicit guidance about how to play, where to go, or what puzzles to tackle. Instead, you have to rely on communicating with your fellow players over proximity chat (or a neat proximity text system) to figure things out. Puzzles can scale to fit two to four players, but as many as 12 people can inhabit a game at the same time.
You play as sentient spheres with arms and legs that don’t look like any species I’ve ever seen, tasked with collecting curious red balls we’ve been calling “nubbins.” You’ll need to stay in touch to navigate the island, which is filled with bushes, sloping hills, and odd buildings that make it easy to get lost. When the sun sets, things get really dark, which forces you to use lanterns and stick together. Big Walk also doesn’t give you a map menu or golden arrows telling you where to go, so it’s up to you and your friends to figure out how to traverse the island.