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Play This Right Now
Welcome to Play This Right Now, the site version of our weekly newsletter in which we celebrate a new game, update, or DLC that we think is well worth checking out. You can subscribe to the newsletter at the link if you want to get our thoughts about a new videogame happening direct to your inbox every Thursday.
A grave error: During one Big Walk puzzle, I flailed my arms around to signal “Hooray, you picked up the correct puzzle piece” to my puzzle-solving partner, and he immediately dropped it on the floor and picked up a different, not-correct piece. Oh no.
Big Walk is a puzzle-adventure game for up to 12 players (but three or four seems ideal, realistically) that insists players use its built-in proximity chat rather than sitting in a Discord channel, for the most part so that it can decide when you aren’t allowed to talk. In this case, we were separated by soundproof glass, so my panicked voice could not be heard when I said, “No no, you had the right piece before!”
I had no one to blame for this mixup but myself: Not more than 10 minutes ago, I’d explicitly designated flailing one’s arms around as the signal for “no, not that one,” even though we’d also been celebrating every solved puzzle with arm flailing for hours by that point.
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With no good and sensible way to use Big Walk’s limited gesturing to communicate an idea as complex as “I screwed up and did the wrong gesture and you actually had the right piece already,” I resorted to vigorously shaking my camera left and right, flailing my arms some more, pointing at the piece that had just been dropped, and jumping up and down.
It’s amazing how complex of an idea can be communicated, or at least implied given the context, with so little, because my meaning was picked up immediately. Maybe the signal for “no” shouldn’t be the same as the signal for “yay,” we agreed after the puzzle was done.
Part of the puzzle of Big Walk is finding the puzzles. You and your adventuring party explore a mysterious island, finding and solving puzzles to collect nubbins that look like those red rubber Kong dog toys. A mysterious black orb beckons you from beyond a wall, and the only way to reach it is to fill towers with nubbins.
Once you’ve found a puzzle, it’s generally easy to figure out what it wants you to do (but not always). Many are simple symbol matching games: One player can see which symbols go where, and has to communicate that to players who, because they’re behind soundproof glass or half-a-mile away on a hill, cannot hear them.
But decoding the mechanism of the puzzle does not equal a solution in Big Walk, because you still need a way to non-verbally communicate essential information, and there’s an unlimited number of codes you and your co-op partners can come up with.
Sometimes we would take the brutish approach of designating a number for each idea we might need to communicate, and then raising our arms up and down to count at each other. It worked, but the best moments arose from our less mechanical solutions.
In one memorable puzzle (minor spoiler for one of the dozens of puzzles in Big Walk ahead), I was in a room full of booths playing looping musical phrases. Outside of that soundproof room, my companions were surrounded by little speakers that were each playing one of those same loops. They had to match the speakers with the booths. They couldn’t hear what I could hear in the booths, but they could see me through a window.
The best idea we had was for me to move my arms in time with each rhythm while they ran around grabbing speakers and checking to see if my arm waggling matched the beat. From my perspective, it felt like I was part of some sort of bizarre clinical dancing trial.
The exploration aspect of Big Walk is great, too. It’s not the sort of game where dangerous creatures roam around in the darkness, but there’s still an edge to it: Nighttime is very dark, it can be hard to climb up some of the more jagged terrain (lots of jumping to gain purchase on slopes, Skyrim style), and voices don’t carry far, making it easy to get separated.
If you and your crew don’t have walkie-talkies—one of several helpful items you can collect along the way—you have no way to tell them when you’re horribly lost. At one point I went off on my own and fell in a giant hole. The walkie-talkie I’d been holding whizzed out of my hands when I hit the bottom. It was pitch black.
There’s a special kind of anxiety associated with the feeling: “I am on my own and can’t tell anyone what’s happened to me.” The flipside of that is the thrill of being reunited, running up to the group arms flailing (because you’re misusing established code again) with a story to tell.
The adventure culminates in an excellent ending, which I won’t spoil except to say that it tipped Big Walk into a GOTY contender for me.
You can purchase Big Walk on Steam, but I’d recommend gathering a group of friends willing to commit to a playthrough (it took my trio around 12 hours, without 100 percenting it) before pulling the trigger. It’ll be best with one committed group that is willing to accept the voice chat restrictions—no alt-tabbing to cheat!
