There are a bunch of things in both video games and real life that I’m no good at: following directions. Staying with a group. Thinking through how to get where I’m going instead of just navigating based on vibes. Big Walk, a new multiplayer-only game from Untitled Goose Game developer House House, requires you to do all these things, but in my six hours with it so far, not doing any of that is what makes it fun.
Big Walk can be played cross-platform with up to 12 people, but must be played with at least two. Whoever hosts the lobby holds on to the save game, meaning you’ll need to play with that person if you want to make progress. Depending on your schedule and how social you are, this multiplayer requirement might be a turn-off, but once I was able to get a group together (after a good couple hours of messaging on Slack with some of my Aftermath colleagues), I can see why it’s like this. Working together is what the game is about, or at least trying to work together.
The basic premise of Big Walk is that you wander a realistic-looking open world that’s dotted here and there with brightly-colored cartoon buildings. These buildings are puzzles that can’t be solved on your own, and they reward you with what my group decided was a red bean. If you bring enough beans to what my group came to call a Bean House, you unlock a key that opens up new features of the world.
Chris and I played with Nicole on a save she’d already begun, in which she’d amassed some vital equipment: a pair of walkie-talkies to communicate if we were too far away for proximity chat, a flashlight for the very dark night part of the game’s day/night cycle. We set off hunting for a Bean House Nicole remembered visiting, but things almost instantly went wrong. While climbing a hill, Nicole punted her walkie-talkie off a cliff; for some reason I promptly did the same with my flashlight. We fell off the hill to retrieve them (there’s no fall damage, but if you fall from high enough you drop your items and could lose them), and I immediately got myself stuck in a hole between some rocks and had to whimper “I’m in here!” over voice chat until Chris and Nicole found me and lifted me out.
Things went wonderfully downhill from there. I kept running off and then getting turned around in the forest. During one puzzle where Chris and Nicole spotted me from a ridge while I went to different platforms to report on their contents, I’m ashamed to say I mixed up the perspective on my lefts and rights and then completely forgot how to get back to the ridge and basically wandered the woods until they found me again.
In my favorite moment, if over an hour counts as a moment, Chris went one way while Nicole and I went another, looking for that Bean House. (I will spare you the humiliating details of how we found it almost instantly while playing later with more people.) Suddenly, Nicole and I realized that we’d taken both walkie-talkies, meaning we had no way to contact Chris. Eventually, we came upon a stalled monorail and honked its horn rhythmically; at some point, we heard the sound of Chris setting off a flare, but we couldn’t see it lighting up behind the mountains that surrounded us. We honked, Chris flared, but there was no way for either party to tell the other what to do.
Finally, worried Chris wasn’t having any fun setting off flares by himself, he and I exchanged purposefully vague Slack messages to come up with a plan for us to go to him. (I would recommend against this; of course you can use Discord or another external chat, but the game is way more fun without it.) Stumbling through the dark, we finally saw a green burst of light; I crashed through the brush and scrambled up mountains until I could trace its arc to Chris. We celebrated being together again–before Nicole and I revealed we hadn’t been able to see Chris’ flares, and Chris revealed he hadn’t even heard our honking. Our communication across the game’s vast island had been totally in my head.
the worst (best?) part of this is that riley and i wandered off together holding both of the walkie talkies
— Nicole Carpenter (@nicolecarpenter.bsky.social) August 4, 2026 at 10:10 AM
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Big Walk feels designed to force you into these moments where you’re outmatched. Everything is just a little bit bigger than your bulbous guy; you have more items than you have ways to carry them; puzzle solutions are physically out of reach or need multiple sets of eyes. Beyond this design being the reason the game requires multiplayer, it also gives Big Walk the feeling of being (sorry) a big walk–you and your friends are small things in this giant, often baffling world.
But rather than being frightening, it feels joyous and exciting. The bright colors of the landmarks and your goofy guys help, as does the fact that you can’t get hurt. You have to overcome your limitations by working together, whether that’s narrating someone through a puzzle or boosting them up a high ledge. You would be hopeless on your own, and you’re sometimes still hopeless together, but by making do with what’s around and lending each other a hand, you steadily make the world more hospitable.
The puzzles I’ve done so far have ranged from simple (including “didn’t even have to do anything” simple, which was a lovely moment) to semi-maddening scavenger hunts to anxiety-inducing obstacle courses to Chris leading us on a massive trek across the map that I honestly can’t believe worked out. Besides not being solvable on your own, I also don’t think they’d be as fun–what makes them rewarding is deciphering them and executing the solution as a group, not the personal cleverness or twitchy execution of a Portal or other puzzle game. Many of them rely on the limitations of your communication: puzzles where you can’t see each other or can only hear muffled voices, puzzles that play with the togetherness that’s core to the game.
I’ll be honest that the need to play with at least one of the same people is a barrier that I worry will wear, but this is what Big Walk is going for. I’ve seen others reference “friendslop” when discussing it, and while I get the instinct, having to always play together feels like it moves the game beyond the somewhat disposable nature of that label. It’s been a while since I’ve been excited enough to play a multiplayer game that I’m willing to deal with the schedules of other working adults; I’m dying to reach some of the strange things we’ve spotted across the map, and I can only do that with the people I started the game with.
But there are still so many beans between us and those sights, so many cliffs to fall off and items to lose and bad, hilarious choices to make. There’s puzzles to solve and new things to find, and it’s exciting to know we’ll have to do it together.
