Big Walk Reviews — Launch Roundup & Steam Rating

The short version

Big Walk landed as one of 2026’s best-reviewed games. The praise is remarkably consistent across outlets: the thing everyone expected to be a gimmick — proximity voice chat — turns out to be the actual puzzle mechanic, and it works. Criticism is consistent too, and mostly physical: the terrain fights you, and the “walk” gets less interesting once the puzzles take over.

Critic scores

Outlet	Score
Eurogamer	5/5
PCGamesN	10/10
Insider Gaming	10/10
GameSpot	9/10
Game Informer	9/10
Nintendo Life	8/10
The Guardian	4/5
Polygon	no score (called it 2026’s best multiplayer game)

Metacritic averages differ sharply by platform: 92 on PC, 88 on PS5 and 75 on Switch 2. If you’re buying on Switch 2, that gap is the one number on this page worth reading twice — it reflects the port, not the design.

What reviewers actually said

• Game Informer (Eric Van Allen, 9/10) finished it with a three-person crew in roughly nine hours. He rates the puzzle design highly, especially challenges that force nonverbal coordination, and is candid that the strict “talk only in-game” requirement feels demanding — closer to organising a board game night than launching a co-op shooter — but concludes the trade is worth it. His main gripe: as the island’s secrets open up, the walking itself recedes, and clambering over ledges can be genuinely fiddly.
• Polygon ran it as a group review (Giovanni Colantonio, Julia Lee and Johnny Yu) rather than a single verdict, which suits the game. Their framing is that Big Walk is explicitly about playing with friends, and that the communication constraints push a group into the kind of awkward, funny, oddly sincere talking you don’t get from a Discord call. They landed on it as a Game of the Year contender.
• Eurogamer and PCGamesN went to full marks, both crediting the game for treating communication as a mechanic rather than a garnish.

The Steam player verdict

As of August 17, 2026, Big Walk sits at Very Positive on Steam: 16,478 positive out of 17,543 reviews — 93.9%.

What positive reviews keep coming back to:

• The social payoff. A striking number of reviews are less about puzzles than about who they played with — families, long-distance friend groups, people who ended up having real conversations mid-challenge.
• Exploration and atmosphere in a large, handsome world.
• Puzzles that are readable rather than obtuse — commonly described as five-to-ten-minute problems that need everyone.

What the negative and mixed reviews keep flagging:

• Proximity voice range. The most common complaint at launch was that friends sounded too quiet even nearby. House House shipped version 1.4.8 on August 7 to normalise quiet microphones — but deliberately did not extend hearing distance, calling the limited range core to the design. See voice & text chat.
• Terrain and collision. Getting snagged on scenery and awkward ledge-jumping come up repeatedly, and match Game Informer’s criticism.
• Pacing. Some players find the world empty between points of interest, and later puzzles easier than the early ones.
• Cosmetic customisation is thin — a frequent request rather than a flaw.

Sales

Panic announced on August 10, 2026 that Big Walk passed one million copies in six days — faster than Untitled Goose Game managed. That figure is paid sales only and excludes free PlayStation Plus claims (see pricing).

How to read a co-op review

Worth keeping in mind when you compare verdicts:

• Group size the reviewer played at — a 3-player review and an 11-player review describe different games (by design; puzzles scale around four).
• Whether they respected the in-game-chat rule — playing over Discord flattens the puzzles; a review that did this tested a different, worse product.
• Which platform — see the Metacritic spread above.