// KOTAKU — GAMING
I Love Big Walk’s Tutorial Playground
Big Walk is a game about going on a long hike with your friends and getting lost together. I love it very much. There are many reasons why I love it, and you can read about some of them in my review, but one thing I love that I did not have time to address in the review is the tutorial. It’s fantastic.
I do not often think of tutorials as “fun.” They are, at their best, helpful and informative. But Big Walk‘s tutorial is very, very fun. Please let me walk you through it and explain why, though I think you may need to experience it for yourself to truly understand (you should play Big Walk):
When you first appear in a game of Big Walk, your screen looks like this:
When you turn around, there’s a long tunnel ahead of you, which leads into a big room that looks like a child’s playground:
You can wander around the room in any direction you like, and depending on where you go, you might end up seeing sections of the tutorial in a different order. That’s fine. There’s no importance to the order in which you learn these things. If you go to the left along the path, as many might do, you’ll encounter several other little halls and rooms like your own, from which your friends who you are playing with will begin to emerge. They will be exploring the tutorial at the same time as you, so you may find them shouting at you across the room or clanging cowbells at you as you learn. More on that later.
You may also encounter an object that looks like a football, and may or may not figure out how to pick it up.
Drop down, and there’s a wall with four images and four buttons, showing how to sprint, jump, crouch, and sit. You’ll likely try all these out:
A great place to try them out is right behind you, on this jungle gym, which also has a fun little thing to learn on a sign:
You’ll try it on the slide, and it works as you think it does. Whee! At this point, my friends had all come over and we were taking turns sliding down.
The real fun begins as you walk forward from the bottom of the slide. You’ll first encounter a big orb, and you’ll probably figure out on your own that you can click to pick it up. If you click again, it lights up. Click on, click off. Now you have a light you can run around blinking at people.