The Indie Informer

Big Walk Review: It’s The Destination

Big Walk

Developer House House • Publisher Panic • Release August 4, 2026 • Reviewed On PC

I wasn’t sure I would be writing this review. After all, getting a group of busy adults together for any length of time feels increasingly difficult the older I get. Likely, many people reading this will be worried about this exact issue. Big Walk will reasonably take its intrepid adventurers anywhere from twelve to twenty hours, depending on how much of it you take the time to trek over. But time doesn’t work the same when playing this game. What feels like minutes in-world is actually hours, and somehow even the busiest members of my group were able to clear substantial chunks of their hectic calendars to join in on this experience. The magic ingredient responsible for all of this time-bending is pure, simple delight.

Big Walk sounds, on paper, baffling. It has to be played co-op. There is no motivating narrative arc. The playable characters are oddly shaped and painted in primary colors while the landscape is naturalistic. There are no objective markers telling you where to go. There is no fast travel to shorten the time it takes to hike over the land.

The first tip of my hat goes to whatever pitch developer House House used to get this game funded. Seriously, I hope to hear the story at a convention talk someday. Of course, even in a fraught funding landscape, it helps that the game’s creators had a major indie darling already behind them. The makers of Untitled Goose Game were certain to inspire an excited news cycle no matter what their next project would have been.

With this unexpected follow-up, House House has proven it has the magic touch. Big Walk is hard to explain to anyone who hasn’t jumped in, but it is among the year’s best titles. Every hour I spent in this game was untarnished joy.

Its genius design allows a group of friends to both simply enjoy each other’s company in an organically unfolding expedition, while also providing something new to do at every turn. The basic idea is to locate designated puzzle areas, work together to solve the puzzle, and then grab the silly prize. These ridiculously shaped, lumpy objects act as keys to unlock, well, an actual key, which, when placed in the right spot, grants access to more of the world.

It’s harder than it sounds. My group had to overcome a vast landscape through night and (very, very dark) night with characters that can barely jump and run at the speed of a waddling duck. On top of that, the unbelievably varied challenges strained our brains, communication skills, and reflexes.

No matter how difficult the task, my group pulled each other through, usually with plenty of uncontrollable laughter to punctuate our mistakes and fist-pumping to celebrate our wins.

What Big Walk truly offers is a place to just be a gaggle of silly friends in a world where it seems harder and harder to spend real, quality time with the people close to you. Every step across this bizarre island built us up to its final test. The new inside jokes in the form of wacky gestures, the understanding we gained of each other’s strengths, the tailor-made language we’d developed just for this game, they all became tools to help us finally succeed. And we all found ourselves unexpectedly misty-eyed as we said our last goodbyes to the experience.