Slow Down with a Big Walk

Big Walk

Sometimes a movie, a tv show, a game, a painting, some kind of artistic work comes out and it feels like someone made it just for you. With all of your sensibilities and tastes in mind. Like someone read your diary and made the thing you always wanted. That's not what happened when I took a Big Walk.

What is Big Walk anyway? I've been thinking a lot about the idea of elevator pitches. Meaning, what is the best way to convey something esoteric without someone having to listen to a twenty minute dissertation? I'll take a run at it, step into the elevator, there's room.

Imagine you're a kid again. The world is impossibly big. Unending even. This Bigness is only equaled by your fascination with it. You aren't alone, your friends are here. There's a big world for you to discover, but you can't do it alone. Literally, you can't reach the item in your backpack or the radio on your belt. 

You find yourself in an unfamiliar structure full of brightly colored jungle gym equipment akin to one of those children’s gyms that have popped up around town. After a moment, you hear voices echoing in the space, familiar ones. You find strangely colored bipedal duck-people. It’s your friends! Turns out you’re a duck person too! There is no name or tag of any kind indicating who is who, so you ask. You learn what color you are. In doing so, Big Walk masterfully teaches you its first and most important lesson: Your understanding of the world is only complete through the eyes of each other.

Every obstacle challenges you to sync your wavelength with everyone else. And, consciously or otherwise you do. You take turns having moments of eureka.

Oh? What's that? This is your floor? That's ok, I'll follow you to wherever you're going to keep telling you the good news of Big Walk.

Brass tacks: it's a puzzle game that focuses on teamwork. You talk to your friends via proximity chat. Meaning, your distance from another player, as well as the surrounding environment dictate if and how clearly can hear them. After about thirty feet, a shout sounds like little more than a faint echo. Any further sounds like hardly anything at all.

You find yourself in the woods. Unfamiliar shrubs, trees and rocks dot the beautifully rendered landscape. As you admire the sun rising over the undulating waves of a nearby beach, you see even more colorful things off in the distance. You embrace the inexorable pull of curiosity. As often happens in Big Walk, you get separated from the people you've come to rely on. It gets dark. The kind of dark only those who have been in the woods without a flashlight know. Pitch. Sounds of the world surround you. The chattering of a strange insect. The sound of pushing through dense foliage around you. Fear begins to creep in at the periphery. You run, the same way you did taking out the trash at night as a child. You were never in danger, not really, but the fear you felt was real. It's real here too, only rivaled by the feeling of relief when you see a light wiggling in the distance. It's your friend! You're not alone anymore. None of us are.

Oh? What's that? You're going into a doctor’s appointment? Fair enough... PLAY BIG WALK.

Now for the sit-down-and-read-this pitch: To experience this game, I had to take a Big Walk from where I was comfortable to somewhere else. The beautiful dichotomy of really living in a place that I’ll likely never set foot in reality fills me with a yearning I’ve not felt before playing a game. Maybe I’ll visit Wilson’s Promontory National Park in Australia one day, (on which developer House House based Big Walk’s island).

Similar to the game's genre, colloquially and irreverently dubbed 'friendslop', I didn't think there was anything there for me to find. Friendslop being the latest trend of gaming meant to be a one-note multiplayer experience that can be made cheaply in the hopes of a particularly risk averse return on development investment. I’m so happy to be wrong about Big Walk.

A game can be a lot of things. A feeling, a vibe, a story, a challenge, a puzzle. Good games are a combination of these. Great games take these elements and assemble them into something more. Something magical. Big Walk is more than a feeling, in short, it’s magic.

Damn near every challenge must be done by working together. These physical puzzles were executed with great effect in nearly all instances. Puzzle difficulties range from frustratingly difficult to simplistically silly. You will begin to learn the ‘rhythm’ of the puzzles that leads to reliable Eureka moments at nearly every stop.

I will only spoil one puzzle here as the discovery of each is the highlight of the experience. My cousin MC and I were traipsing through the bush (as you often are in Big Walk) and we came across a cliff, at the bottom of which was a green house. After hemming and hawing about what the telescope on the cliff pointing at nothing was for, we opted to go to the house and solve a puzzle likely within.

We shout to our nearby people and we adventure forth, leaping off the cliff and landing with a cartoonish BOINK, forcing us to drop whatever we were carrying, much to my chagrin. (Don't ask me about MC dropping our only map in the same manner. I’m still not ready to talk about it outside of my therapist’s office.) We find ourselves at a simple single doored house with large windows on either side, a couch, some chairs, and a large clock on the wall.

Big Walk gives you hints for its puzzle, often striking the balance (and nailing) the balance between obvious and opaque solutions. Oftentimes the hints are in the room the puzzle takes place in, other times the hints are in the world around you!

But I digress… The whole squad arrives, we pile inside and hit the button on the wall. The door locks and the digital clock displays an ominous countdown. Five minutes. Controlled panic ensues. What do we do?! We scour the single room shack. Eureka! A beam near the roof! It looks like there is a button up there! We take turns lifting each other via one of the game's best mechanics dubbed 'uppies'. We pick each other up creating a stack of little weirdos until I reach the beam on the ceiling. Nope. No button.

The clock continues to mock us. We must be missing something. We press the button again to open the door and the clock resets. We keep trying. We look around the space for a long moment. We've been playing for an hour or so now. We are learning the game’s language. Big Walk tells you what it wants. Chairs, a locked room, a countdown. I think this game just wants us to sit here and talk. So we do. Worst case, the counter hits zero, we fail and we try again.

We all sit in the locked room. My cousin Swiffer talks about tea. I tried the tea life but I eloquently explain that journey ended by saying, 'Tea sucks!'. This is met by jeers and tea defenders. Fair. I'm sitting in this room with my cousins. Like I did summers as a boy. We don't talk about anything important. Passing thoughts, puns, jokes, life, pancakes. The moment passes too quickly.

The clock hits zero and, just like every time you solve a puzzle, a cartoonish fan fare erupts from the ether! Confetti falls and the mechanical vice holding our reward, which we have named Skulls (named for its similarity to our strange characters' heads), slowly releases its payload. The confetti is met with appropriate hoots and hollers as we load it onto someone's back. This is the last of the three five skulls we need to return for… something? The group hikes back to a nearby brightly colored tower, at the top of which we have previously found empty indentations that the skulls will fit into. 

That's what Big Walk is really about. Discovery. Don't get stuck, like I did initially, squinting and trying to make sense of it. Don't hold on too tightly. The reward for the green room wasn't the skull, not really. The reward was time with people I care about. Did I get extremely frustrated when people weren't taking the puzzle solving as seriously as I was? I'm ashamed to admit it, but I sure did. But that's what life is isn't it? Discovering when to hold on and when to let go.

There were moments where the magic wasn't so apparent. When walks were a little too long. There are moments that are transcendant. I don't want to describe them here because my words would fall short. The ending is very much worth it. A fitting capstone. A crescendo that left me in tears. This eclipsed the nit picks in my case. Do I wish you had more chotchkies to play with while your homies finished a puzzle?  Or that the puzzles were a little bit more challenging on a whole? Sure. That would make Big Walk a marginally better 'game' but that's not really where the sauce lives in this one. Big Walk forces you to meet it where it is and you have to trust that it'll be better for it. And they're right, it is.

As of this writing, I have not fully fully finished the game. I will when I can wrangle all of my cousins to be online at the same time. We will though, so there may yet be more to uncover about this gorgeous experience. I already know what my biggest problem with the game is though: I'll never get to play it for the first time again.

It's a beautiful feeling to know you aren't alone. Especially in the dark.

DING Oh, this is my floor.