We finished Big Walk this evening. It was excellent! I am going to share some spoilers after the image, so consider yourself warned. If you would like to read something not spoileriffic about Big Walk, may I direct you to the article I wrote about it here? Thank you.
One of the things Big Walk continually impresses on you is the importance of communication, whether that's communicating over short to moderate distances in order to collaborate on puzzles, taking the time to just have a chat, or finding a means to get one another's attention from a long distance apart if you happen to find yourself separated.
I suspect every group will find their own ways of dealing with this particular challenge — and every group will have its own members that, for one reason or another, present additional challenges to everyone, including themselves — but it's something you will likely settle into fairly quickly in collaboration with your walking partners. I'd be interested to try it with other people and see how different the dynamic is between group members and group sizes — though I'm also conscious that once you've solved a lot of these puzzles once, it's a lot easier to play through the game, so I don't know how inherently replayable the whole thing is.
Anyway, the reason I mention this is because towards the end of the game, Big Walk takes away two very important things that you have likely been using for your communication up until this point: your visual identity — in other words, the colours you have chosen to represent your character, which you can "paint" onto each other in the introductory stage of the game — and your voice.
Yes, the finale sequence of Big Walk completely takes away the ability to voice chat with one another, meaning you will have to find ways of communicating not only each participant's part in a puzzle solution, but also determine between you what on Earth you are supposed to do in each puzzle.
Thankfully, Big Walk does have a fairly robust gesturing system that allows you a surprising amount of flexibility in terms of waggling your noodle arms around, but you still have to find a way to agree what each gesture means, having likely not had an opportunity to do so verbally beforehand — unless, of course, you had the foresight to do so "just in case" you were not able to communicate through voice. But why would you need to do that? Taking players' voices away in a game built around cooperative play and communication would just be mean, wouldn't it?
Well, yes, it would, but it also makes Big Walk's finale sequence incredibly memorable. There are, I think, seven puzzles you have to complete in the run up to the actual ending, and each challenges your group to think on their feet and find a way to get various messages across to one another without using words and without being able to visually identify who is whom. It really works extraordinarily well — I won't spoil the actual solutions for the puzzles here, for the sake of anyone who didn't heed my spoiler warning but is still intending to actually play Big Walk, but I'll just say that the "kettle puzzle" was my favourite for how gleefully silly it was.
Anyway, once you finish Big Walk, there is a "postgame" to play, too, which we're probably going to tackle in a subsequent session. There are a lot of puzzles on the map that we didn't solve in our various explorations, and we found a place where you have to put a whopping fifteen of the collectible thingies (we call them "Kongs" after their resemblance to a classic dog toy) in order to do… something? We don't know what yet ,though I have a suspicion. That's a job for another day though.
I'm impressed how substantial the game actually is. It took us three very long sessions to get through the entirety of the "main" game, and there's still a fair bit more for us to do. This is one of numerous reasons why I don't think it fits into the ill-defined "friendslop" category; to me, "friendslop" says games that you play with your friends that are over and done with in one session, and which "don't matter". Not in the sense that they're worthless, but in the sense that they don't have a long-term overarching goal; each session is self-contained, like an individual play of a board game, rather than part of a broader "campaign" in which you're working together to achieve something.
Anyway. I had fun! And aside from one of those finale puzzles, which I found very difficult to get my head around for some reason (as did everyone else, I think) I am relieved that Big Walk, despite whipping much of games media into a similar frenzy as we saw for Blue Prince last year, is a very different sort of experience. And for me, it's nice to actually be able to enjoy an indie darling for once, because on a significant number of past occasions, they have left me cold. This led me to doubt that Big Walk would actually be any good, but I'm glad I decided to give it a try. It was very much worth it.
Now it's nearly 1am and I need to sleep. But that was, indeed, a Big Walk.
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