>>FULL REVIEW
We are deep into the era of games people have started calling "friend slop" and I am completely fine with that when the result is something like Big Walk.
There have been plenty of multiplayer games lately where the actual mechanics are almost secondary to having a group of idiots in Discord making each other laugh. Big Walk understands that appeal better than most of them, but it also puts considerably more thought into the game underneath it. My friends and I are not just running around waiting for something funny to happen. We are exploring a genuinely interesting world, figuring out puzzles together, getting separated, finding strange things and constantly becoming distracted from whatever we originally planned on doing.
That freedom is a huge part of why it works. Big Walk does not constantly shove objectives into your face or make everyone chase another progression bar. You can head toward something that looks interesting and see what happens. Sometimes that leads to a puzzle. Sometimes somebody finds an item nobody understands. Sometimes the group gets completely sidetracked because one person wandered away and now everyone is trying to figure out where the hell they went.
The proximity voice system makes those moments even better because communication itself is part of the game. Friends get quieter as they move farther away. Walls interfere with conversations. Walkie-talkies become useful instead of being another pointless toy sitting in an inventory. There are even situations where the game takes normal communication away and forces everyone to improvise through gestures or whatever tools are nearby.
It sounds simple but it completely changes how the group interacts with the world.
The puzzles are smart enough to make us stop and think without turning every session into four people silently staring at a walkthrough. Most of the fun comes from everyone throwing out ideas and slowly building a shared understanding of how something works. The game scales its challenges around different group sizes too, although I personally think the sweet spot is at least three people. Big Walk technically works with two players, but more personalities create more of the unpredictability that makes exploring so enjoyable.
The world itself deserves a lot of credit for making wandering around worthwhile. House House could have built a collection of multiplayer puzzle rooms and probably still had a good game, but the large outdoor environment gives everything space. There are places where we actually slow down and look around instead of immediately searching for the next objective marker. The combination of realistic-looking environments and the ridiculous characters running through them gives the whole thing a style that is hard to confuse with anything else.
It is also refreshing to play something multiplayer that does not need somebody to win.
Nobody is sweating over rankings. Nobody is yelling about a bad loadout. We are not trying to finish a battle pass before it expires. Big Walk just gives us somewhere interesting to hang out for a few hours and enough structure to stop it from becoming an empty sandbox.
The major problem is that all of this depends almost completely on having people to share it with.
There is no normal matchmaking system that can throw you into a group of random players. You need to bring your own friends or go looking for people elsewhere. You can load into the world alone but there is very little reason to do it because the puzzles are designed around cooperation. Even though the full game supports as few as two people, I would hesitate to recommend it unless you know you can consistently get a small group together.
That is a pretty significant condition for buying a game.
It also makes Big Walk difficult to score purely like a traditional adventure game. Someone with three or four friends ready to play could easily have one of their favorite multiplayer experiences of the year. Someone buying it without a group could spend twenty dollars on something they can barely use.
The good news is that the developers seem to understand exactly what type of game they made. Big Walk costs $19.99 instead of trying to stretch this concept into a full-price release, supports cross-platform multiplayer and allows groups as large as twelve. Early issues with proximity voice volume were also addressed quickly after players complained that friends were too difficult to hear.
For me the social requirement is both Big Walk's biggest weakness and the entire reason it is so good.
There are games with deeper progression and games with more complicated puzzles, but I have enough of those already. Big Walk gives my friends and me a weird place to explore where the best parts of the night usually happen somewhere between the things we were actually supposed to be doing.
In the current wave of multiplayer games built around hanging out with your friends, this is one of the ones that actually feels like there is a great game underneath the chaos.
WHO THIS IS FOR
Anyone with a few friends looking for a relaxed cooperative game where exploring talking and screwing around are just as important as actually making progress.
SKIP IT IF
You primarily play alone or cannot reliably get at least a couple friends together because most of what makes Big Walk special disappears without them.
