While my group meandered and lost each other in Big Walk, we talked about how excited we were to see what speedrunners would get up to with the game. I’ve been keeping my eye on the leaderboards since; while the scene is still developing, runners are already finding ways to do as little big walking as possible.
Spoilers follow for the end of Big Walk.
Speedrun.com currently has entries in two categories for solo speedruns of the game, “Big Goodbye Unrestricted” and “Big Goodbye Flightless.” These runs both provide the answer to a question that came up in my group after we’d played through the game’s final (or semi-final?) tower of puzzles: Could you skip the whole game and just big walk yourselves to the end? Apparently, yes. The final area is gated off by a big green wall and a gate that requires a key, which itself requires getting all the other keys, but speedrunners have already found ways around all that.
In the current world-record “Unrestricted” run, player OLIVERb beats Big Walk in 8:37 by grabbing a light orb in the opening area and then using a glitch to fly over the map. The glitch seems to work by continuously picking up and dropping an item while jumping (player Chocler has a tutorial if you want to try it for yourself, though they say they believe it only works on keyboard). Oliver then simply flies past the entire game world until they can trigger the ending screen.
In the “Flightless” run, player BowBeau picks up a football in the starting area and uses its collision to clip out of the map. (Player hoppy has a few more details on how this seems to work.) This eventually dumps them back into the game world, where they have to walk for a while before using the same trick of holding an item to clip out of bounds again and get around the big green wall. Then, they enter the puzzle tower, use another item to clip out of that, and walk through the game-ending door for a current world record time of 10:33.
In the delightful, weirdo nature of speedrunning, I love that both of these make the entire point of the game moot. And I also love that it’s technically a way to play the game solo, though you aren’t really playing the game as such. I have no doubt speedrunners will figure out how to play more of the multiplayer-only game on their own; one has already figured out how to get up ledges that would traditionally require a second player to boost you, and another has sorted out how to beat some early-game puzzles solo.
I’m most curious to see how fast players will be able to beat the game in the more “traditional” way by actually playing through the puzzles. Runners are working on it; the current leader for a two-player glitchless run is a little over an hour and a half, by players Che_Da and RNGTime64:
I imagine with the maximum number of players and some good planning, a group could divide and conquer the map pretty handily to beat the game without relying on glitches or tricks. That’s the kind of thing I’m most curious to see, because it relies on skills that make sense to me, as opposed to the wonderful, bizarre things speedrunners do that often baffle me even in games I’m super familiar with. There are a bunch of as-yet-unrecorded categories on the speedrunning boards, so I’m excited to see what else speedrunners figure out.
Nathan Grayson
