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I’m way behind with this post. In some ways, I’ve had a lot going on; in some ways not much at all. But in typical fashion, I’m not going to catch up to my self-imposed cadence with something quick and light. This time, I’m not going to delineate between TTRPGs and video games, because this one has to be a little of both. It’s time for a Big Post.</p>

As a quick note: this post includes discussions of death. Just a heads-up in case you need it.</em></p>

Big Walk</h2>
Big Walk</a> is a game by House House, the developers of the deservedly beloved Untitled Goose Game. It’s a “walker talker” game that consists of solving a bunch of puzzles with friends on a giant mysterious island. It’s an odd fusion of The Witness with some of the “friendslop” sensibilities that have become popular in the past few years, but with a refreshing departure from the roguelike structure that dominates the genre.</p>
I played Big Walk with three other people. I was a little late to the first session so I’ve still never seen the tutorial area, but they caught me up quickly and before long we were off exploring the island and figuring out what we were supposed to do.</p>
Big Walk is actually quite good at pitching itself; its trailer gives a spot-on description of what the playing it is like. Rather than the horrible gig work or constant danger of popular multiplayer sandbox games of recent years, Big Walk is mostly just about exploring and solving little challenges. Talking in depth about what I love about the game would both spoil some of the best bits and, ultimately, fall short of what I really want to say about it.</p>
First: the game is truly wonderful and you should go find any amount of friends to play it with. More importantly, it’s been a distinctive way to spend time with friends with who may not share all the same gaming interests. It’s a game of equal parts puzzles, shenanigans, and long and clumsy treks through wilderness. All of these activities are cornerstones to what Big Walk does: it tries to facilitate quality time, connection with each other. It’s an idealized version of trust falls or team-building exercises, where the only ulterior motive is to make you and your friends laugh and have a good time together.</p>
Nearly all of Big Walk’s puzzles are about communicating. No one player ever has all the information or all of the control over the puzzle’s moving parts, but someone has the first part and someone has the last part and the trick is to get all the information across various boundaries.</p>

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As you can see, we clearly know exactly what we're doing</div> </p>
The game is also goofy: its characters and animations are cartoonish and strange and smile-inducing, its scenery is an oddball mashup of photorealism and toyetic primary-colored landmarks. It’s just as often a game about miscommunicating as it is about communicating, and the unsuccessful outcomes tend to be more funny than disappointing. At the starting area, I grabbed a whiteboard and wrote “Hey Steve, catch!” and then kicked it in his direction. He never did catch it and I have no idea if he even saw what it said, but it made me laugh every time.</p>
Big Walk is really about exploring a place together that you will eventually be done exploring. It’s not an engine for generating procedural entertainment that you can play to pass the time with your friends like so much of today’s indie multiplayer games. There’s nothing wrong with the procedural approaches, but there’s also something wonderful about the sense of place and shared experience. It’s a game that wants to acknowledge that time we spend together is meaningful and comes to an end eventually.</p>
Big Walk is ultimately a series of interactions with your pals through various intermediaries. Sometimes that means interlocking puzzle mechanics and sometimes it’s simply the virtual space of the game’s world. Those little interactions are everything. Big Walk is watching your friend jump off a tower before you finished telling him where you wanted to meet. It’s turning around and realizing that you lost track of your buddy who was following you just a moment ago. It’s gesturing frantically through a window to indicate the next answer to a puzzle. It’s improvising a gesture language to communicate puzzle inputs through soundproof glass. It’s picking up and carrying your friend all the way to the next landmark because he’s finishing a burrito right now IRL. It’s shooting flare guns at each others’ feet and giggling as everyone’s entire screen is obscured by colored smoke. It’s stumbling through the forest in utter darkness because you have several MacGuffins to bring back to base and you couldn’t carry the flashlight.</p>
But Big Walk is also sitting on an unhurried train and spamming its horn and bell sound effects as you wait for your destination, or posing by the window as the scenery slowly passes. It’s peering through a telescope or binoculars as your friends stumble over rocks and foothills to get into position to solve a puzzle. It’s sitting on a chairlift and asking your friend what he and his partner are going to name their daughter, who’s due in mere days. It’s signing off for the night to get some rest and wondering when you might all be available to play again. Though we’ve seen credits, we still want to go back for some post-game secrets to find. But even if it hasn’t yet, it’s going to eventually end and leave us with just the memories of playing together.</p>

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Big Loss</h2>
Back in the real world, in late July, my partner and her family found out that one of their closest family friends had suddenly passed away. The loss that they feel is beyond what I could imagine, as he was entangled in their lives for many decades. This past Saturday, my partner and I attended his wake.</p>
Personally, I knew Chris for almost ten years, but most of the time I spent with him was across about a dozen weekend-long get togethers. Back in 2017, I joined an annual tradition amongst my partner and many of her dad’s old work friends: a whole weekend of in-person tabletop RPGs. Those weekends were spent playing games, sharing snacks and beer and wine, and breaking for dinner in the evenings. Even seeing Chris barely more than once a year, he was the kind of rare and wonderful person who makes a big impression regardless.</p>
I’m hardly in a position to eulogize him compared to my own loved ones who knew him far longer, but I can certainly talk about what it was like to play and run games with him—that’s mostly how my time in his company was spent.</p>
It wasn’t till 2022 that I actually ran</em> a TTRPG for that gaming group. I pitched Monster of the Week, which I hadn’t run before, and it was nerve-wracking; they’ve all been gaming for decades</em> longer than me and I was nervous I’d let them down. The game went fine, all things considered, and Chris later emailed the group back with an in-character report that summarized our adventure. I’ve been assured by others in the group that several of them used to write play reports like that, but they eventually found it to be too much effort. I don’t know for sure if Chris was especially inspired by our session, or if he just wanted to make me feel welcome. Either way, it’s hard to forget seeing that email and feeling that I might really have done a good job running that game. In all sorts of games over the years, Chris always played curiously, cooperatively, and graciously.</p>
For the last few of these annual(ish) gaming weekends, my partner and I have hosted them at our place. We’ve insisted that Chris stay over with us for a couple of nights instead of driving back and forth to his home an hour away each day. While he was visiting, he’d watch Formula 1 races with us in the mornings before the rest of the group arrived to start the day’s adventures. After a while, our extremely shy cat would eventually warm up to him enough to tolerate his presence in the same room. Whenever he gently reached a hand out to her or spotted her slinking about, he called her “little beastie.”</p>
Besides gaming and collecting wine to share with his friends, Chris had another passion that I was well aware of: hiking, exploring, and taking nature photography along the way. At his wake was a slideshow of pictures documenting his many outdoor adventures over the years, proof of how much it meant to him to walk in the natural world, through sunlight or snow, on the west coast or the east coast or anywhere in between. I never did get to go hiking with Chris, but I was likely only a phone call away from doing so on any given weekend. Of all the silly regrets I could have, the keenest one is that I never did make time to drive down his way and go on a hike with him.</p>
Big Hike</h2>
After Chris’ wake, my partner and I picked up some old friends and headed out to Yosemite national park for a trip we’ve been planning for several months. As we got on the highway, we were thinking about photos from the slideshow that were taken in Yosemite; we hoped that spending the weekend out there, seeing some of the places he’d been, might be a nice way to honor his memory.</p>
Yosemite means a lot to me. I grew up camping there summer after summer with close family friends, hiking around the valley and spending time around campfires getting to know my parents’ dearest friends, people whom I call Aunt and Uncle to this day. The same kinds of people that Chris was to my partner and her family.</p>
With one of my friends having just welcomed his newborn daughter, I knew my Big Walk crew would be on an inevitable hiatus. But while I was in Yosemite, I managed to miss out on a another kind of grand ambulatory undertaking.</p>
This entire trip revolved around Big Plans to hike Half Dome, which would have been easily the most grueling physical challenge I’ve ever undertaken. I was a little apprehensive, but I felt ready to take on the challenge and excited to really push myself to do something difficult. It was going to be myself and four other friends, most of whom had been training and practicing for months.</p>
But thanks to a strain injury in my right foot in the final days before the hike, I found myself completely unable to participate. I couldn’t even join another group of friends on a milder hike. I could barely even walk at all that day. My friends took a bit longer than they hoped, but they conquered the climb, sending photos and videos from the summit; as sad as I was to have missed it, I’m so proud of them for making it all the way.</p>

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This rock is now my enemy</div> </p>
Selfishly, though, I haven’t felt this frustrated in a very long time. Hiking is enjoyable for all sorts of reasons, but a big challenge like this would be a rare undertaking for me. To miss it was devastating in a way that I honestly couldn’t have anticipated, and left me stewing in a bitter cocktail of FOMO, defeat, and isolation. I was frustrated to have been absent for those moments of striving together with close friends, of camaraderie in the face of a difficult trial, of meandering conversations that start mundane and veer absurd or existential. I think, a little bit, that I was also still feeling sad about never getting to spend any time outdoors with Chris.</p>
Big Picture</h2>
It would be careless not to mention that I’m a generally able-bodied person who does not have any experience with long-term physical disability (though I am acquainted with chronic pain from tendonitis). Working through my feelings about missing the big hike also involves better appreciating my mobility when I’m healthy.</p>
More generally, I’ve been trying to find a way to tie this all together into some Big Feelings about everything I’ve been thinking about in the past couple of weeks. I’m left with a lot of thoughts about walking. About hiking, about moving, about having two feet that work and about what I can do with or without them. About the next big challenge I’ll set for myself and who I’ll share it with. About if or when I’ll stop</em> challenging myself, and how much time I might have left to do so.</p>
When loved ones pass, it’s always sad to think about their unfinished or unresolved efforts, but I find an odd comfort in knowing that Chris was still in the middle of things. He was finishing up remodels to his house, he was uploading nature photography</a> as recently as May. He was over at our place playing games back in June. Even if he knew his limits were changing, I get the sense that he never really had to stop doing the things he loved before the end.</p>
One of the things that made Big Walk so joyous is that it was an opportunity to both spend time with friends and</em> overcome something together with them. It wasn’t especially difficult, nor were the challenges immune to the occasional cheap circumvention. But by the end, Big Walk made us develop communication skills that we may not have started with. Fostering those communication skills, and building them around the particular toolset Big Walk provides, took not just puzzle-solving but also time spent chatting and meandering the landscape, riding trains and chairlifts, splitting up and reconvening. And when you reach the end of the road, it’s okay for it to end. If we’re lucky, there are more journeys together in the future.</p>

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Before you face Big Walk's endgame challenges, you embark on one more big walk</div> </p>
Whether I’m hiking on a trail or just walking somewhere, one thing I love about going anywhere on foot is the time spent together with others. Going slowly gives space to enjoy the journey and to see and share all the curiosities that lie between.</p>
I didn’t get to summit Half Dome with my friends this past weekend, but I did get to spend time with them before and after their hike. I did get to relax with their partners and play with their kids and spend time with the rest of our friends. It feels childish to be so down about missing out on one specific excursion, but the reason I’m drawn to going on Big Adventures with my friends is because I love getting to know them and their lives better along the journey. Still, everything I am able to do, every bit of time I can spend with people I care about, is worthwhile. Especially the adventures that I don’t</em> have to miss, and especially the ones that must come to an end.</p>

Thoughts About Games - Big Walk

Big Walks, Taken and Not