Big Walk is really good
I've played several hours of Big Walk by now. It's a multiplayer puzzle game where you look like this:
And solve puzzles in buildings that look like this:
In a much more "realistic" forest environment that looks like this:
That contrast between the game's bright and toylike tools, structures, and characters and the much more noisy, "realistic" environment is super interesting. I think this game is thinking more carefully about realism and using realism more carefully than any game I've seen in literally decades!
Any brightly-colored, kindercare-ass structure or object is puzzle-relevant. The wilderness is not. There's this pervasive ideology in a lot of game studios and player communities that "realism" is a kind of "null" perspective, vacant of meaning or style - which is never true, really. But this game feels like it's saying: okay, if we embrace the idea that realism is vacant of meaning, then it can just be the part of the game that is vacant of puzzles, and the puzzles will be so much more surreal and toylike and stylized that you won't be able to keep your eyes off of them. It's using realism in such an interesting way!!
That said, no realism is without style or value or intent, and this game is very conspicuously aware of that, because it's using Australian wilderness as its "realistic" landscape. Australian landscapes are not common in games.
The rocks are not particularly "realistic," but the plants really are. I can even recognize some of these plant species from Los Angeles landscaping, where Australian plants are often used as ornamentals. (Sometimes, they're also invasive!) I don't know their names, because I don't ID landscaping plants on iNaturalist, but it's wild to walk past a bush and feel like you're looking at a real bush you've seen before in someone's garden. It's nuts! I don't think I've ever even seen a north American landscape with recognizable bush species in a first-person game before. Big Walk is definitely foregrounding the intent that must be present even in "realistic" landscapes.
Anyway, this is a game of compelling contrasts. It's also extremely fun - the puzzles are all just challenging enough to force you and your team to make a plan and cooperate. We have only gotten absolutely stuck on one so far, and we think we know how to solve it. Everything is tuned for a specific number of players, so we're just charging ahead through the three-player map, making weird progress every session and exploring more and more of the surprisingly vast environment as we go. It's delightful.
I'd recommend this to anyone. However, you really do need to be in a different room from the other players to enjoy this game - the built-in VO system is completely key to the experience and you should not be supplementing it or replacing it with Discord. If you want to play with your children, you're going to have to make sure that you can all play in different rooms of the house, with the doors closed. Many puzzles do not "work" unless you are using the game's VO system and can only hear voices transmitted through it. The game is basically 100% communication puzzles, so far.
Here's the trailer, if you're not sold yet:
And here's some cryptic photos from my game. I'm spoiling no objects here that aren't also in the trailer:
