Big Walk is like co-op Breath of the Wild

GamingCloseGamingPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All GamingEntertainmentCloseEntertainmentPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All EntertainmentGames ReviewCloseGames ReviewPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All Games ReviewBig Walk is like co-op Breath of the WildYou explore a vast world and solve tricky puzzles — but in Big Walk, you figure it all out with your friends.You explore a vast world and solve tricky puzzles — but in Big Walk, you figure it all out with your friends.by Jay PetersCloseJay PetersSenior ReporterPosts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All by Jay PetersAug 3, 2026, 1:00 PM UTCLinkShareGiftImage: PanicPart OfThe best indie games we’re playing right nowsee all updates Jay PetersCloseJay PetersPosts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All by Jay Peters is a senior reporter covering technology, gaming, and more. He joined The Verge in 2019 after nearly two years at Techmeme.Untitled Goose Game is a tough act to follow. It was a silly experience that captured what I imagine it would feel like to be a sentient goose: a lot of waddling, a lot of honking, and a lot of shenanigans. That’s why Big Walk, the next game from Goose Game developer House House, feels like a radical and unexpected departure. Instead of playing as a goose terrorizing a small village, Big Walk is a co-op multiplayer game where you explore a large island and have to work together to solve puzzles. I’ve been playing Big Walk as a duo with my wife, and while we’re not done yet, we’ve spent more than 13 hours exploring the island and solving problems together. Big Walk may be a comparatively small game, but the experience of making unexpected discoveries can make it feel like a grand adventure in the Zelda mold.The name Big Walk suggests a game about walking — and there is indeed much walking — but it’s really more about talking. Outside of some brief signage about the controls, the game doesn’t give you explicit guidance about how to play, where to go, or what puzzles to tackle. Instead, you have to rely on communicating with your fellow players over proximity chat (or a neat proximity text system) to figure things out. Puzzles can scale to fit two to four players, but as many as 12 people can inhabit a game at the same time.Solving puzzles can be a tall task. Image: PanicYou play as sentient spheres with arms and legs that don’t look like any species I’ve ever seen, tasked with collecting curious red balls we’ve been calling “nubbins.” You’ll need to stay in touch to navigate the island, which is filled with bushes, sloping hills, and odd buildings that make it easy to get lost. When the sun sets, things get really dark, which forces you to use lanterns and stick together. Big Walk also doesn’t give you a map menu or golden arrows telling you where to go, so it’s up to you and your friends to figure out how to traverse the island.Big Walk is crafted so that something interesting is usually hidden just around the corner, like a new landmark, a tool of some kind, and even tall towers. More often than not, you’ll stumble across some kind of brightly colored building that features a puzzle you have to work together to solve, like chatting from opposite sides of a wall to figure out how to put some tiles in the correct order. Sometimes, Big Walk even separates players so that you can’t use proximity chat at all.Coming up with ways to communicate is difficult given that your character can basically only point, jump, and hold things. That means the moments when my wife and I have been separated to solve a puzzle have genuinely been nail-biters. My heart was actually racing when I kicked a ticking kitchen timer up a hill and ho