Big Walk is a game where the hardest boss is your own friend group. House House — the studio behind Untitled Goose Game — built something that looks like a chill walking simulator but plays like the most intense communication exam you've ever taken. There are no quest markers. No minimap. No tutorial text. What you get instead is up to 11 other people, a whole lot of Australian bushland, and a proximity voice system so unforgiving that a boulder between you and your friend can end a conversation mid-sentence.
I went in expecting goose mischief. I got something stranger, warmer, and occasionally infuriating in the best way. After 15+ hours of trekking with groups ranging from 2 to 8 people, here's everything I wish I'd known before my first session.
1. There Is No Solo Mode — And That's the Point
Let's get this out of the way immediately: you cannot play Big Walk alone. The game requires at least two people and caps at twelve. House House doesn't apologize for this because the puzzles literally don't function without multiple humans coordinating in real time.
When you start a session, you pick a size bracket. Two-player and three-player worlds each get their own puzzle tuning. Anything from four up to twelve runs on the same layout, so a huge lobby leans toward chaos over careful puzzle-solving. I learned this the hard way when I tried to start with just one friend, we got through the tutorial, and then hit a puzzle that needed four people to trigger simultaneously. We stared at it for five minutes before realizing the lobby size was the problem — not our brains.
The fix is simple: set your lobby size to match exactly how many people are showing up. If two friends drop out mid-week and you keep playing as a duo in a four-player world, you'll just be stuck staring at unsolvable puzzles. The host can adjust this between sessions, so it's not a permanent lock-in.
2. Proximity Voice Chat Is Your Real HUD
Every multiplayer game has proximity chat these days, but Big Walk's implementation is genuinely different. Stand close and your friend sounds normal. Drift fifty meters apart and their voice thins. Put a hill or a building between you and the audio muffles — sometimes cuts out entirely. Caves echo. Wind on a ridge swallows words. It's closer to real-life acoustics than any game I've played.
This feels inconvenient for about the first hour. Then you realize it's the entire design philosophy. Walkie-talkies buy back range but crackle unpredictably, and there's nothing quite like hearing your friend scream "the red one, no the OTHER red one" through static while a puzzle timer ticks down.
Do not use Discord for your first playthrough. The game actively discourages external voice chat — the official FAQ says it isn't allowed — and you'll rob yourself of the moments that make Big Walk memorable. Half the puzzles are built around restricted communication, and routing around that system dissolves the challenge into busywork.
I tried a session where one friend insisted on Discord "just for emergencies," and within 30 minutes nobody was using the in-game systems at all. The session was fine. It also felt like any other co-op game. The second run, with a group that committed to the proximity chat, was the one I kept thinking about afterwards.
3. Three Is the Magic Number
After running sessions at every size from 2 to 8, I keep landing on three as the sweet spot. A duo can feel genuinely lonely once the map opens up and you spend ten minutes out of earshot. Push past six and it turns into a delightful party game — which absolutely works for a rowdy Friday night, but makes finishing any single puzzle a slog of herding cats.
With three, everyone stays useful and nobody's off wrangling the group. A pair grinds through the story; a loud group of eight treats the beach like a playground. Both are valid. Just agree on the vibe before you load in.
Subjective take: If you have exactly four friends who can commit to playing regularly, that's the runner-up. Four lets you split into two pairs for puzzles that need parallel coordination, while still feeling intimate. Skip the 12-player public chaos unless you're specifically throwing a party.
4. One Item at a Time — Pack Smart
Early on, every player can carry exactly one item in their hands. That's it. No inventory screen, no hotbar, no "I'll just pick up everything and sort it out later." This turns gear management into an actual strategic decision, and I watched multiple groups completely ignore it and regret every second.
Here's what you should spread across the group before anyone wanders off:
| Tool | Why It Matters | Priority | |------|---------------|----------| | Walkie-talkie | Long-range voice — essential for any split party | 🔴 Critical | | Binoculars | Scout terrain, spot landmarks, find lost teammates | 🟡 High | | Flashlight | Night falls fast and it gets dark | 🔴 Critical | | Laser Pointer | Mark puzzle elements for teammates at a distance | 🟡 High | | Flare | Emergency regrouping signal | 🟢 Nice to have | | Megaphone | Broadcast to scattered groups | 🟢 Nice to have | | Whiteboard | Leave notes, draw puzzle solutions | 🟢 Nice to have |
The walkie-talkie earns its slot more than anything else in the game. I once spent 15 minutes trying to reunite with a friend who'd wandered off without one — we were on opposite sides of the same mountain, shouting into wind that ate every word. Don't be us. Every separated subgroup needs at least one walkie-talkie.
Later, you'll find backpacks and waist bags that add carrying slots, but items on your back or hip can't be used — only carried. So your walkie-talkie on your belt will let you hear teammates, but you can't speak into it. Plan accordingly.
5. Don't Skip the Red Bridge Tutorial
The first major gate in Big Walk is lowering the red footbridge at the edge of the starting area. You need four red gourd-shaped trophies, each locked behind a puzzle: the blue house (symbol matching through a wall), green pillars (simultaneous switch pressing), orange platform (binoculars + timed retrieval), and yellow crane (verbal crane operation).
I've watched groups skip trying to understand these puzzles properly and then hit a wall later because every puzzle in the game builds on these same principles — communication under restriction, timing coordination, and describing things your teammate can't see.
The blue house puzzle in particular is the game's thesis statement. One person sees a sequence of symbols on a screen. The door closes. The other person has to arrange matching tiles on a wall, based purely on the first person's description. "It's the squiggly one" doesn't cut it when there are four squiggly ones. You develop a shared vocabulary or you fail. This pattern repeats across the entire game — if your group can't communicate through the blue house, the rest of the island will eat you alive.
6. Puzzles Are Built Around Talking, Not Skill
What surprised me most after multiple sessions is how the game keeps mining the same idea — "you can't talk to each other freely" — without ever wearing it out. Variations include:
- Soundproof rooms: one player sees a clue they have to describe through glass while the other can't hear a word
- Blindfolded obstacle courses: one player wears a mask that blurs their vision, the other guides them verbally
- Charades locked room: act out arm movements and poses for a teammate to match on a puzzle board
- Split echo pillars: four tones activated in sequence across a canyon where shouting doesn't carry
The charades room was probably my favorite moment in the entire game. Watching my normally-articulate friend flail his arms trying to mime "crouch and point left" through a glass window while I guessed completely wrong gestures for three minutes straight — I haven't laughed that hard in a co-op game in years.
Subjective take: skip looking up puzzle solutions. I know it's tempting. But the puzzles aren't hard because they're mechanically complex — they're hard because communication is the difficulty. An external walkthrough bypasses the entire point, and you'll finish the game in 6 hours feeling like you missed something. Which you did.
7. Staying Together Is Harder Than You Think
Without a minimap, even experienced groups can scatter within minutes. Dense bushland, winding hills, and similar-looking trails make orientation surprisingly difficult. After losing teammates in three separate sessions, we developed habits that actually worked:
- Never let anyone explore alone without a walkie-talkie. This is non-negotiable.
- Appoint a navigator. One person keeps track of landmarks and calls out headings. Everyone else follows.
- Leapfrog explore. The navigator stays at a safe landmark. A scout advances. Once the path is confirmed, everyone moves. Repeat.
- Name your landmarks. We started calling things "Big Pointy Rock," "Angry Tree," and "Red Thing Hill." Stupid names, but we never got lost after that.
- Use flares sparingly. They're fast but limited. Save them for genuine "where is everyone" emergencies, not casual regrouping.
The buddy system also matters. If you're playing with 4+ people, pair up. Two people searching for two other people is exponentially faster than four people all searching for each other.
8. Everything You're Holding Survives Between Sessions
One anxiety I had during my first playthrough was losing progress. If it's 11 PM and everyone's tired, is all that gear gone tomorrow? Nope. Everything fastened to your body or held in your hands reappears in a pile at the starting area when you load back in. Backpacks, tools, trophies, all of it.
This means you can actually end a session mid-puzzle if you need to. The save system is tied to the host — one person's file tracks the whole group — so as long as you return to the same host, everything picks up where you left off.
9. The Kick Button Will Betray You
This sounds like a joke. It's not. Big Walk has a dedicated kick button, and I have watched it cause more disasters than every puzzle on the island combined. Kicking random objects across the landscape is undeniably entertaining. Unfortunately, the game doesn't stop you from punting important puzzle trophies into rivers, off cliffs, or into bushes where they become genuinely difficult to retrieve.
My group learned this lesson when someone enthusiastically launched a hard-earned control panel key down a steep ravine. Everyone laughed for about thirty seconds. Then we realized we actually had to go get it. The retrieval took twenty minutes and involved two people dangling off ledges.
Simple rule: If an object looks important, don't kick it unless the puzzle explicitly expects you to. The kick button is for beach balls and each other's binoculars — not for trophies you spent half an hour earning.
10. Night Comes Fast — Grab a Light
The day-night cycle in Big Walk moves noticeably faster than in most open-world games. Night can fall while you're only halfway through exploring a new region, and it gets genuinely dark — not "dim lighting for atmosphere," but "I can barely see my character" dark.
Grab a flashlight or a carryable lantern before you leave the starting area. The fruit-shaped bulb lights scattered around the island are helpful landmarks — turn them on as you pass, even if you have to detour slightly — but they don't provide enough ambient light to navigate safely. They do, however, give you a fantastic bird's-eye map of where you've been when you view the island from a tower at night.
Once we had proper lighting, nightfall actually became one of my favorite parts of the experience. The mood shifts completely. Conversations quiet down. The radio's music feels warmer. The island at dusk is genuinely beautiful, and having a flashlight beam cutting through the darkness while your friend's voice crackles over a walkie-talkie is a vibe no other co-op game has managed to capture.
11. Platform Choice Actually Matters
Big Walk is on PC, PS5, and Nintendo Switch 2 with full crossplay — so a mixed-platform group works fine. But the Switch 2 version runs noticeably rougher than the others. If anyone in your group has a choice, point them toward PC or PS5. The game's not graphically demanding in a traditional sense, but the sprawling draw distance and real-time voice processing seem to push the Switch 2 harder than you'd expect.
Also worth knowing: Big Walk launched day-one on PlayStation Plus as an August 2026 monthly game. If you have a PS Plus subscription, you can claim it for free until August 31. That's a $20 game for zero extra cost, and it's a big reason the player count exploded to 46,409 concurrent on Steam alone in the first 24 hours.
Verdict: Why Big Walk Matters
Big Walk isn't competing with the action-heavy co-op games that dominate the charts. It's doing something quieter and riskier: making communication itself — not reflexes, not builds, not loot optimization — the core challenge. And it works because House House understands that the best moments in multiplayer games are rarely the ones the designers scripted. They're the accidents, the misunderstandings, the shared vocabulary that emerges when you've been calling the same rock "Big Pointy" for three sessions.
With a Metacritic score of 92 (one of the highest of 2026), a $20 price tag, and 8-15 hours of genuinely warm co-op content, Big Walk is the easiest recommendation I've made all year — provided you have friends who will actually use their microphones.
If your group won't talk, skip it. This isn't a game you can brute-force with ping spamming and Discord callouts. But if you have two or three people who enjoy the chaos of restricted communication and trust-fall puzzles, Big Walk will give you stories you'll still be telling each other months from now. Just don't kick the trophies.
Last updated: August 6, 2026. Based on 15+ hours of gameplay across multiple group sizes on PC and PS5.
