Summary
I’ve spent something like seven hours in funny-thinky cooperative puzzler Big Walk, and the concept of more Big Walk is something that confounds and, just a little bit, frightens me. What, you spent an entire evening stubbing toes in the dark and overconfidently barking incorrect solutions at friends, only for the opening of the map room to reveal the humbling significance of your progress thus far, and you want more? Friend, if I play this until my forties, I might make it halfway through. Even so, questions on future content were repeatedly put to developers House House in a recent reddit AMA. The response: no plans at the moment, though there’s nothing stopping completionist players from making their own fun with its freeform systems. “We’re not really sure what Big Walk’s future looks like - getting this far took heaps of work and a long time!”, wrote level designer and artist Jake Strasser. “We need a good rest before we start thinking about what’s next.” Designer Stuart Gillespie-Cook was more overt, saying there are “No content plans” in terms of expansions or other DLC. “But I will say we’ve had great success playing hide and seek amongst ourselves! We hope the game world is generous enough to make your own games within it.” That could be interpreted as the game’s map being vast, diverse, and ecologically detailed enough for the kind of Manhunt rounds that would make your favourite childhood park feel like a panel of fake IKEA grass. I prefer, however, to think of it as an invitation to toy around with Big Walk’s interaction and physics quirks. For instance: Human Slinky, the game my pals and I invented while waiting for another friend to sort their malfunctioning mic. Simply take the rigid body of a disconnected comrade, carry it to the top of a staircase, and see who can achieve the most top-and-tail flips as they stiffly cartwheel down the steps. The AMA also accounted for the lack of couch co-op, programmer Nico Disseldorp explaining that “Unfortunately the game is designed around restricted communication in a way that wouldn’t really make sense in local co-op. Lots of what is interesting about the game comes from one person knowing something (like where they are in the world, or the answer to a challenge) and another player not knowing it, and then trying to find unique ways to share that information.” There are other non-vanilla ways to play, mind - modder and indie dev CircuitLord is several versions deep into a Big Walk VR mod, the installer for which you can grab here. Assuming you’re among the 1% of Steam users who still play VR games. Read this next
Big Walk’s voice chat volume issue has been resolved with its latest patch, but House House are sticking to their guns on its overall design - Big Walk isn’t an open world hangout sim, it’s a secret Predator game, or it would be if House House would quit fixing the voice volume - Big Walk was born during a COVID lockdown out of a distaste for birthday party Zoom calls