You're in the woods at night with a couple of your friends looking at a construction crane towering above you, a tantalizing red button at the top, far out of reach. You have no idea what that red button does, but c'mon. It's a red button. You're not going anywhere until you've figured out how to press it.Throwing things at it doesn't work, so you move onto the next plan: kicking things at it, which doesn't work even more. In the 45-minute preview I got of Big Walk, the "cooperative online walker-talker" from House House, developer of Untitled Goose Game, it was one of my co-op partners who finally cracked the case: instead of using objects to push the button, could we use each other? We could. We picked each other up, and the three of us, standing on each other's shoulders, could now reach the button easily.I won't reveal what the purpose of pushing that button was—we didn't realize it for a while ourselves—but it was just the first of a half-dozen or so puzzles we encountered in the game's gentle open world. Like the tower, solving these puzzles required exploration, teamwork, lots of communication, and at least one dance party.OK, the dance party wasn't required, but like everything else in Big Walk, it was a lot of fun anyway.I played Big Walk in Portland, Oregon, at publisher Panic's office (developer House House is located in Australia and was not present). After getting our bearings in a minimalist tutorial room, my two co-op partners and I (playing with me were The Verge's senior reporter Jay Peters and the Portland Mercury's arts & culture editor Suzette Smith) wandered off into a world filled with trees, hills, rivers, a day-night cycle—and lots of puzzles.
