Big Walk is like co-op Breath of the Wild

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.

Big Walk is crafted so that something interesting is usually hidden just around the corner, like a new landmark, a tool of some kind, and even tall towers. More often than not, you’ll stumble across some kind of brightly colored building that features a puzzle you have to work together to solve, like chatting from opposite sides of a wall to figure out how to put some tiles in the correct order. Sometimes, Big Walk even separates players so that you can’t use proximity chat at all.

Coming up with ways to communicate is difficult given that your character can basically only point, jump, and hold things. That means the moments when my wife and I have been separated to solve a puzzle have genuinely been nail-biters. My heart was actually racing when I kicked a ticking kitchen timer up a hill and hoped that I had given my wife enough time to drop it in the right spot. Often, when you have to figure out some sort of code to solve a puzzle, the game forces you to wait for a few agonizing seconds to know if you completed it correctly. When you do get one done, you’ll see a joyful burst of confetti and get a new nubbin.

The way Big Walk is structured has some pitfalls. You’ll spend a lot of time just hiking around the island to get somewhere new, which can be tedious. You can’t do much in the game without at least one other person, so that means you have to match up when you want to play with whoever else is in your group. At the end of a long day, sometimes my wife and I didn’t want to hop into the game to walk slowly, get lost, and solve hard puzzles. Our conversations were often punctuated by yawns, which any fellow parents with a toddler will understand.

But Big Walk’s constraints are also what make it so remarkable. While hiking around and promising ourselves we’d seek out a single puzzle for the evening, we’d often decompress about our day and catch up on things. When we found a puzzle, we’d get extremely invested in figuring it out. After we solved it, we’d usually have the energy to tackle another one. We even figured out how to use the limited moveset to give each other high-fives and hugs.

Many of the elements that made Goose Game great are present in Big Walk. There’s a lot of walking, a lot of talking, and a lot of shenanigans. While playing Big Walk, however, I also kept thinking of a very different game. The sense of discovery and joy are much like what made The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild so special, whether that was finding a kooky way to solve a puzzle, stumbling upon an extremely useful item, or climbing to the highest peak and taking in the view. But unlike Breath of the Wild, Big Walk let me share the world, and those moments of discovery, with my best friend.

^{Big Walk launches August 4th on the Nintendo Switch 2, PS5, and Steam.}