Tag: house house

#oneaday Day 835: All night long

Remember how yesterday I said a group of friends and I were going to play Big Walk "this afternoon"? Yeah, well, we started in the afternoon, my time… and concluded twelve fucking hours later. I have never, ever had a multiplayer session so long that the batteries in my headset went flat. Until now! (It's also been a very long time since I pulled an all-nighter on a video game, but those are usually solo.)

There are some mild Big Walk spoilers ahead. I will not be sharing complete puzzle solutions, but I may talk a bit about the thought process involved in some of them. You have been warned.

I don't think any of us expected the session to go on for so long, since we were in Big Walk's "postgame". We had partly (and correctly) assumed that the postgame would just involve going around and cleaning up any puzzles we didn't complete as part of the process you go through to "beat" the main game, but we were also aware that we'd discovered a place where there were fifteen empty slots for the "Kong" figurines that are your rewards for completing the various puzzles, and thus there was probably still a fair amount of work to do. We didn't know what the end result of doing said work would be, though.

We should have known, really; in our process of beating the main game, there weren't fifteen puzzles left over. And sure enough, once you get into the postgame, a selection of "purple Kong" puzzles unlock in a part of the map that was previously inaccessible. These mostly take the form of challenges similar to puzzles found elsewhere in the game, but made significantly more difficult and/or time-consuming somehow.

That said, there were also two puzzles from our "main game" leftovers which had left us reasonably stumped, so we had intended to come back to them. Both of those proved to be extremely time-consuming, too, so in retrospect it's no surprise that solving fifteen puzzles in total took twelve hours. We did make up for it with one of the other main game leftover puzzles taking us less than two minutes, though, because our team are now Big Walk pros, apparently.

Some of the most interesting challenges we encountered involved having to split up the party in various ways. One puzzle tasked us with looking through telescopes to find a series of four pedestals, and once there was at least one person at each pedestal, we then had to find a way to synchronise our button presses. Another challenged us to find a specific sound somewhere on the island. Another still involved locating things that we had used in various other puzzles and taking them to another location. In each of these situations, the challenge was communicating over a long distance: the game does have walkie-talkie items, but given you are limited in what you can carry — you can hold one thing in your hands, one on a belt loop (once you've found one) and one on a backpack (likewise), but you cannot access the belt or backpack items yourself — it's not always practical for everyone to carry one of these. And besides, you have to find them first anyway!

We found a way in each instance, though. And it wasn't just the long-distance puzzles that gave us these communication challenges, either. One of the "purple Kong" puzzles required us to figure out how to communicate complex information between two different rooms, when one room could use an intercom but the other could only respond by turning a light on or off. Another tasked us with communicating auditory information between rooms with a completely soundproof barrier between them. Another still tested the limits of how precisely we could verbally communicate visual information.

The one we left for last was a harder version of an earlier "golf" puzzle involving an extremely heavy ball that we had solved earlier in the game. The initial, main game implementation of this puzzle was fairly easy to solve, but the postgame variant involved getting the ball over a significantly longer distance, which required some creative thinking and teamwork. Among the many talents and skills that Big Walk tests, patience is one of the most significant of all of them. In this modern, attention-deficit world, I suspect there will be at least some groups who find the patience and endurance challenges to be some of the most taxing.

Still, the "true" ending was worth it, and I was grateful we didn't have to go through the immensely difficult "finale" of the main game again. That finale was a great experience, but having to do it again after twelve hours would have probably killed me.

One thing I really appreciated about Big Walk as a whole is that it's just an excellently designed game. It's a game which understands that when you're tasking people with confronting some significant, cooperative challenges together, it pays to have a clear, distinct visual language that everyone can learn to understand quickly and easily. Subtly, and without explicitly telling the player at any point, it introduces you to various concepts as you progress through the game — many of which are in the "starter area" — and coming to recognise those different elements of the game and what they mean is a key part of learning to play Big Walk effectively. Communicating your understanding of those elements to the rest of your group is important, too; if you know something but the others don't, it won't help the group as a whole if you keep it to yourself!

Anyway, we successfully completed all of the game — with the only thing (I think) we didn't find in our playthrough being the "shiny paint station". It was very much worth it, and if you have at least one good friend to play it with, I highly encourage you to do so — and to take the time to play it from start to finish. It takes a while, but it's very much a worthwhile activity to spend a few sessions on together. I certainly won't be forgetting our experiences in a hurry.

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

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#oneaday Day 813: That sure was a big walk

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.

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.