Figuring out new ways to talk in Big Walk

For a moment in our three year long marriage, I felt like I was further away from Eve than I had been before. There was no way for me to let her know what had happened. We would probably laugh about this in a few minutes, but for this moment, I was alone to sulk in my fun little fuck up.

I grumbled for a moment because I knew I absolutely would not find the walkie talkie I had just dropped.

It was my fault. I had tried to jump off of a chairlift onto the top of a cliff knowing full well that if I waited just like fifteen more seconds, I would be at the station. I felt somewhere inside like the risk would be worth it for the thirty-ish seconds that Eve would be saved from waiting as she sat in a chair a mountain ridge away. She was probably fine, she would be reading something online waiting for me to say I'd arrived at the box holding our prize. I could probably say nothing and she wouldn't be the wiser. After all, she'd never been where I was going and she had no idea how long it would take.

All Eve had was my statement I'd made a few seconds before I jumped: "I think I'll be there in like two minutes, maybe one."

My wife and I talk a lot, or better put, we banter. It doesn't matter if we are having a good day, a bad day, if we're so totally in love with each other, or if our gears have been ground down a bit, we chatter away, hopping from subject to subject, thought to thought, meaningless observation to meaningless observation, you get the gist...

I picked up Big Walk on a whim. It was a game I'd seen some development videos for a while back and absent a large group of gaming friends, I felt like it would pass me by like so many other games in the "friendslop" genre for sake of just not getting the same experience out of them. Eve, my wife, had done her best to join in where we found ones that really sold themselves, but Big Walk seemed so far afield from what we had played that it just didn't register as something we would play.

When the game came out, a few folk that I follow on social media had taken the time to give it their earnest good reviews and wanting to support House House and their team, I figured I would get the game, hound Eve as much as she would let me for her to try the game, and if that didn't bear fruit, I'd ask around a bit content in knowing that at the vey least, I'd have put my money towards a good project. Perhaps the algorithm, upon seeing some money spent would direct the game to someone else that would cherish it.

Eve did finally agree to give it a go, though this introduced the second problem: the size of our apartment...

Mechanics spoilers here but Big Walk thrives in the players having no chance to communicate with each other outside the game. Our apartment does not give us this benefit easily. Sure we have a bedroom and office on opposite sides of the place with two doors in between, but an old school brick and mortar apartment this is not. We did get the benefit of needing the AC, which put in some white noise, but still, for once, we couldn't be loud lest we break the well-crafted mechanics.

I knew somewhere inside that if I yelled out "FUCK" as I slid down the hill, watching the walkie talkie bounce away from me on it's own journey that I would not be able to replicate, Eve would hear me and know something was wrong. There was some comfort in the feeling that if I was truly in a bind, all I had to do was walk out of the bedroom, dash around the kitchen island, open the office door, poke my head in, and say "hey".

We had resorted to this once before.

In a challenge devoid of actual vocal connection, I realized that my slight deafness was making solving a puzzle an impossibility save for raw luck. My one good ear works in overdrive, but it does not do me well to just hear in one direction. I needed us to change places, for me to be the noise maker and for her to be able to use her talents to perceive which direction noise was coming from. To her credit, she had figured out a way to help me before I even slid the office door open and after some slight reassurance that my genetic issues weren't going to rob the joy of this game from me, we went back to solving it without saying a word.

So far though, even in these moments of little fuck ups, and there were a few more, we forged ahead. I elected to do the same.

With my means of communication lost to the dense digital foliage, I got to my feet and began to climb the hill to the spot I had intended to land. There was one bit of irony to this all: it was day, my favourite time in the game, and if it had been night, there was some slight chance I could recover.

The day-night cycle in Big Walk is punishing. So many games couch their idea of night in a comfortable twilight, a menagerie of greys all lightly distinguishable, even without a source of light.

Not in Big Walk.

No. In Big Walk when it gets dark, you lose the constant unacknowledged ease of visual communication. Did you and your partner forget to bring a big buoy-like light with you? Did you want to bring some other tool, like an item finder or a megaphone or a walkie talkie or a map or perhaps a [fill in the blank nameless game objective, we called ours the baby or the child] you're transporting to a tower? If the answer is yes, you're fucked, welcome to the darkest video game night you've ever seen.

The number of times in the 30-ish hours Eve and I committed to our first playthrough that one of us would wander off in the dark of the night with no beacon, only to get hopelessly lost looking for the small light of a player's eyes somewhere out there, feels countless. Add to this is the fact that Eve and I can be brats. She knows that she will get a reaction out of me if she happens to take a slightly different way to our destination in the dark and she thrives off of those laughing huffy conversations we have once it's all done. It's all part of the appeal.

My walkie talkie is lost lost. This is not the first time I've lost one, far from the first, but sometimes its been night and the blinking indicator light on its face has helped me find it. After all, once you fall from any real height, you do drop anything in your hands, it is helpful to have that small blink. No, now I have to make a decision.

I could climb up to the top of the hill and get to a tower and climb the tower and use the radio to let her know that I would be a bit longer, that I had no walkie talkie, that I wouldn't be able to tell her when I came up on the objective and that she should probably hold down on the button that would open the camouflaged box, that it would happen soon.

I could take the chairlift back, find another walkie talkie stand and take that one, but last she heard, it would be two minutes, maybe one, and at this point, it was more like three and it would easily be another five or so if I went to grab a new one. That was off the table, we had spent too much time apart. In my heart I knew that I had to go on trust.

Trust is a virtue in Big Walk. Trust, as it turns out, is its own form of communication.

Sometimes in the progression of the game, you will be on different sides of the island with no means to reach out at hand, with only the plans made and agreed on in person and then held in the heart to guide you as you head out in different directions.

Eve and I process directions in very different ways, which was made clear early on in the game, long before we found backpacks and hip holsters.

I think like a practiced field scientist. I make a map in my head, create a grid, and establish reference points in that space. When I find new things, they go on the grid. I rotate the apple clearly in my mind, to tie it to a popular reference. I then trace the path of where I've been and where I need to go and let the whole thing evolve.

Eve is a bit more freeform.

To me, it can feel a bit like letting a kid out in a store, like if I say to go grab sauce in aisle 8, there's a non-zero chance I'll find her shortly in the veggie aisle as she follows the goals in her heart.

The island in Big Walk is a little, tiny, itty bit bigger than a grocery store with so many more ways to go the wrong way and so knowing that your partner can get to the right place and figure out what to do, that's important. The trust is key.

I elected to get to the objective.

I had been there once before, which is why we were able to cheese this puzzle a bit. I'd been off doing my own thing, which is just one of those things you can do in this game to a satisfactory degree, and I found a box with a microphone by it. At first I thought it had belonged to a whole different puzzle that had been on our to-do list for a week, but it wasn't. When I finally figured out how the puzzle worked, which is such a rewarding and brilliant feeling in this game brimming full of puzzles, I slotted it in to our dwindling list of ones we had yet to do.

A quick aside, but very few of the puzzles in Big Walk are cheese-able. For two players, it's pretty much a guarantee that both players will need to be active in solving the challenge at hand, and honestly, for the very few that can be done alone, it just doesn't feel right to be so greedy in a solution. Back to it.

Part of the joy in Big Walk is the idea of consistent mechanics. If you see a thing or a device or a tool in action in one place, it is going to work the same in other puzzles. So many of them work as a form of Chekov's guns, if you see an item used as a mechanic once, you bet it will come back again.

I had a feeling in my heart that because I'd seen a microphone by the box, it would mean that Eve, sitting in her chair on a rocky bluff overlooking a beautiful beach, would hear me as soon as I talked near the microphone. I felt the gamble was worth it. I still felt deeply alone. I felt the tingle of embarrassment for a risk taken that bit me in the ass. But I felt hope that we could solve this puzzle despite all of that.

I found myself on the ridge where I had stumbled upon the box a number of days prior. I knew it was hidden, but it was still on the grid of my mind. I poked around a bit, first having gone too far in one direction, but the fire was lit within. One a second pass, I found the hollow and a microphone situated in such a way that if we had solved the puzzle the way the designers intended, would have allowed us to figure out the general location with the right tool in hand. I felt a bit sad that a tool that we mostly used for fun would never live up to the intended mechanic.

I approached the box and it opened. I hadn't even said a word. Eve would later tell me that she'd been pressing the button out of boredom after those few minutes had passed, but she had heard my approach. She had debated closing the box. Of course she had. Still, I got the [fill in the blank] out of the box and confirmed by means of speaking into the microphone and watching for the opening and closing of the box that we were done. We each had different trips to make home.

She had her hands free to hold a light so I suspected she would risk a climb over the densely forested ridges as darkness fell. I already had egg on my face from losing the walkie talkie and with no option to hold a light, I found the smoothest path down the hill to a monorail station that would take me back home in safety.

Minutes later, our child safely stored, we turned off our Switches and met on the couch, where I began to tell her about my fuck up as she laughed, our bond even closer.

This last part is in fact spoilers in a way, so if you don't want them, take some joy in those last moments of the story above. There is a sweet spot at the end though so maybe find yourself there.

There is a moment in the course of the game that you and your group, despite being in the presence of each other, are robbed of the mechanics of speech. Given where it happens, there's a chance you might not even realize it until it's too late: one moment you're in awe of finally getting to such an anticipated climax, the next, you've lost the ability to make a peep. Any amount of coordination to make it through this part goes back to trust entirely.

Trust that you and your partners can remember how you solved similar puzzles before.

Trust that you are all in it to win it.

In a game that emphasizes the different forms of communication, suddenly you are fully dependent on the nuances of your past experiences.

When the tension of the challenge finally resolves, the world around you shifts, and you are gifted back the ability to express yourselves properly, it feels like a miracle. It's a relief like finding water in a desert.

Nothing beats the moment after all of this. Stepping out of our spaces to just reflect with Eve on what had transpired between us felt so welcome, like so many cherished moments after the major shifts in our lives that brought us closer together.

Eve can be afraid of endings. There are a lot of shows that we've gotten most of the way through, many games that we've almost beaten together.

Big Walk is not one of these.

Getting to the end of the game, the actual end end of it, felt like something we'd built together.

The eureka moments where one of us figured out a puzzle the other had struggled with.

The sunsets and sunrises that we paused for.

The hills we slid down as our tools tumbled helplessly out of reach.

The constant banter back and forth as we went about on our way from one place to another.

The game became a part of how we interacted over those 30 hours, a link that went beyond ourselves, a world with both a purpose and a whole deep open wealth of room to exist in a meaningless sense.

Hopefully someday we can return with others in tow to experience challenges that are both familiar and yet changed by the complexities of having more people around. We will build new memories fueled by new fuck ups and triumphs. For now though, this is what joy is, figuring out new ways to communicate and trust that we can heard and be heard.