Radiant sunsets glinting on lapping waves; bushland valleys that beckon with secrets; modernist buildings sat atop craggy ridges: Big Walk’s setting is as arresting as it is beguiling – a kind of architectural fever dream transplanted to a handsome Australian wilderness – but it is the images created by players that lodge deepest in the mind. Here’s one that has stuck with me: in the black of night, cicadas kicking up an almighty din, I had lost my partner. Panic. Despair. Fear. Then, there in the far distance, I saw him signalling in my direction. He was relentlessly spamming a gigantic, ball-shaped lamp on and off, the ground around him flicking from inky dark to warm pastel pink and back again, like a single Christmas light blinking from afar.
This kind of encounter is common in Big Walk, the brilliant and whimsical new online co-op puzzler from House House, the Melbourne-based studio behind the 2019 viral hit, Untitled Goose Game. Rather than playing as a honking, mischief-making goose as you do in that game, you are a bug-eyed, gangly limbed kind of bird person (think Pingu as drawn by Mondrian) for whom getting separated from your mates is all part of the fun. That’s somewhat because this rugged terrain is dense with vegetation and cliffs to fall down, and also because the game makes ingenious use of proximity and direction-based voice audio. Step out of earshot of your party and you will find it difficult to call for one another (unless, of course, you’ve picked up a Fisher-Price-like walkie-talkie).
