House House, the indie developer behind Untitled Goose Game, launched its excellent co-op exploration game Big Walk on August 4, and it’s unsurprisingly shaping up to be a fan favorite. But there’s a caveat: Big Walk has to be played with anywhere from two to 12 players. Progression is gated behind teamwork, which makes it fundamentally impossible to play solo. And for players who aren’t lucky enough to have a group of pals who are ready to drop $15 on a game (and, worse, figure out a time when everyone’s free to play), there’s no online matchmaking or public lobby system.
Basically, you have to have friends to play Big Walk.
As a result, Big Walk’s subreddit is currently flooded with players looking for other people to play with. There’s already a mega-thread with over 200 requests, and the rest of the subreddit quickly became saturated with game codes, requests for groups located in certain time zones, and vague posts that just say “Wanna play?” (The game just launched a few hours ago! On a weekday!)
Most people seem pretty eager to find pals to play with, but a few don’t seem too happy about the game’s friend requirement. Most recent games that have fallen into the “friendslop” camp incorporate public lobbies and are technically playable alone, so Big Walk’s restrictions have caught a few players off guard:
But, despite its blobby, colorful avatars that seem to suggest that this is a $5 game that you and your friends will beat in an hour and never launch again, Big Walk is different. Current estimates say the game takes around 15 hours to finish, which means you’ll need to plan a few different sessions with the same group of people, something that public lobbies would make fundamentally impossible.
I think it’s fun that Big Walk is forcing players to befriend strangers through outside coordination, actually! It’s heartwarming to see so many players making friends within hours of a game’s release. Although I haven’t played Big Walk yet, I can only assume that the game’s exploration gives players a lot of weird moments to bond over, such as collectively assigning names to these mysterious blobs.