Big Walk might be the best multiplayer game of the year

Big Walk is a game about making your friends laugh and exploring a giant world together. It sounds incredibly simple at first, but the game is rich, vibrant, and packed with a whole heap of tasty puzzles to unpick with your pals.

I got the chance to hop into Big Walk ahead of launch, courtesy of the game team, and found the experience to be a blast, despite usually only playing single-player games. If you enjoy playing light-hearted and vaguely surreal multiplayer titles, you’ll fall in love with Big Walk to the same extent that I have.

Full of charm and soul

Big Walk sums up its gameplay loop neatly in its title; the game is about walking around a big world with your friends.

This is a multiplayer, voice chat-focused game that involves plenty of exploration and puzzle-solving, tasking players with working together to press buttons, find key items, solve riddles, and collect puzzle pieces.

The world in Big Walk feels like a sandbox of sorts. You’ll spawn initially in a tunnel leading to a home base, with a colorful playground area to test out the game controls and murals on the wall explaining key movements.

Not only is this area a tutorial ground, it’s also a hub where you’ll spawn in every time you play and find any lost items before heading out on a big walk.

Once you’ve got your party together, you’ll be able to set off on your adventure, walking into the wilderness. The world in Big Walk is vast, largely styled as a forest, with a smattering of colorful puzzles strewn about the foliage, along with vibrant lighthouses and other points of interest.

There’s no main path to follow or set direction; it’s a case of picking where you think looks interesting and heading that way. While there is a progression path to follow in the game, you can, technically, complete puzzles in whatever order you like, and pick and choose where to go.

I loved the freedom that Big Walk gave me. Each time I spawned in to play with friends, we’d just go “yeah, that looks cool” and trundle off in a vague direction, throwing light orbs and picking each other up along the way.

The core gameplay loop revolves around solving puzzles to earn strange, red items – my party called them plumbobs while playing – and then placing these red items into slots around the overworld to open up new areas of the world or methods of transportation.

Puzzles vary wildly, but the common element in all of them is teamwork. You’ll need to work with your mates to solve riddles, press buttons in sync, bring a tomato timer through a maze, or find red lights in a room full of lamps, all with the aim of getting your next plumbob.

As noted, you can hit these puzzles in any order, and you don’t even need to finish one set of plumbobs at a time. I went through them out of order in my playthrough and still had a blast exploring the world.

A vast, noisy world

So, I have a laser pointer. And a torch, and a megaphone, and a strangely 2D backpack. Items change the game completely in Big Walk, improving your methods of communication and helping you navigate the world more easily.

Communication is a big part of Big Walk, as the game revolves around its voice chat system. While you could theoretically use a service like Discord instead of the in-game proximity chat, I’d highly recommend not doing this. The game is built around its proximity chat, which features both voice and text, and it adds a good layer of challenge to the puzzles.

A good example of this is a puzzle I encountered in the early game, where I went inside a soundproof room and had to gesture to my friend which buttons to press in sync with lights on the inside of the room. If they could’ve heard me, it would’ve removed all of the fun.

Speaking of sound, though, I found Big Walk to be incredibly noisy. More specifically, the ambient sound in the overworld felt surprisingly loud, and there did not appear to be any ways of turning this down. You can mess with your mic input somewhat, which did help, but I would’ve loved more audio customization options.

The soundscape was well-designed outside of this, though. There were crisp sound effects throughout Big Walk and some incredibly jazzy music at certain moments. I did admittedly get jumpscared by the noise that the plumbob makes when it’s inserted into a lighthouse slot once or twice.

Visually, Big Walk is an absolute treat. The world is vibrant and teeming with nature; you can explore a lush forest, climb a mountain, and walk along a beach, all within 5 minutes of each other.

I adored the implementation of the colorful puzzles in the overworld. My party and I would be walking through the forest chatting, then one of us would yell that something yellow and pointy was sticking out of the leaves ahead. There was a real sense of joyful discovery that made the world rewarding to explore.

Performance-wise, Big Walk ran nicely during my time with it. I have a fairly low-range PC, but I could comfortably run it at medium graphics settings, and it still looked lovely. I would’ve loved to see more options for visual customization here, though, particularly in the realm of color-blind accessibility options.

The control scheme was nice and intuitive, with an immensely expressive gesturing system. You can wave, waggle, point, and hold items above your head as you run; said items can include your friends, which I thought was delightful. Pro tip – if your mate goes AFK, pick them up and place them somewhere else.

Big Walk acts as the perfect vessel for a genuinely delightful journey with friends. Aside from a few minor quibbles, I had a joyful time playing Big Walk, and I’m intending on hopping right back into the game this weekend to play more of it. It’s one of the best multiplayer games of 2026, and I highly encourage you to check it out for yourself.

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