Over the last week or so, I played through Big Walk, the new online-only co-op puzzle game from House House, the developers behind Untitled Goose Game. I played with a group of friends that included fellow Kotaku writer Rebekah Valentine, who wrote a lovely review of the game you can read here. The six of us had a great time, each of us playing on a PC or other device separate from one another and communicating only through the game’s limited options.

It’s a co-op experience that I’ll never forget and one which not everyone will be able to enjoy for various reasons. And while that does make me sad, I’m happy House House didn’t compromise its vision or design ideas to add in a solo mode, random matchmaking, or other options in an effort to make Big Walk something that everyone in every situation could play. The new co-op game is a stronger, better experience as a result.

In Big Walk, you can only communicate with your fellow players if you’re close to them in-game or find a radio or walkie-talkie that facilitates long-distance chatting. If you get distracted and walk away from the groupâsomething that happened to me a few timesâyou’ll soon be all alone with no way to chat with your friends. This forces you to backtrack or try to get their attention. Sometimes I’d find them after searching for a bit. Other times I’d head to a spot where I knew I could find an emergency flare and fire it off, signaling to them where I was and helping them track me down.

Likewise, I appreciate that there’s no solo mode. Yes, it sucks that if you don’t have a group of gaming friends or family members willing to play Big Walk with you, you might never get to experience what I think might be one of 2026’s best games. And yes, it does mean you all will need to own copies of the game and devices to play it on, as well as headsets to communicate through. That ain’t cheap or easy in 2026.

And yet, the addition of a solo mode would completely ruin Big Walk. This isn’t a game about being alone at all times and solving random puzzles, Myst-style. It is a game about managing a group of friends, having fun with them, solving puzzles together, and sometimes getting lost and having to work to find each other.

Big Walk only works as a co-op game and only works if you aren’t able to chat with your friends at all times, the way you can if you’re in the same room or on a Discord call, for instance. This does limit who can play Big Walk, but it also lets the game be something truly special and unique, too.

I’m fully aware that some of Big Walk‘s puzzles aren’t designed for people who have vision or auditory disabilities. And Big Walk‘s main accessibility solution is to let you and your friends skip puzzles that can’t be completed for whatever reason. That isn’t a great option, and could potentially rob the game of a lot of its best moments. Yet I also get it. There are puzzles in Big Walk that demand you can hear or see very clearly, and there’s really no way around those things being central to the experience of those puzzles. They wouldn’t work any other way. So letting players who can’t complete them skip them is probably the only option that makes sense, without having to so radically redesign the challenges that they end up becoming different puzzles altogether.

I’m not an asshole. I do feel bad that Big Walk is not a game that everyone will get to enjoy. That sucks, and I hope those people can one day put together a group of friends or get access to another device that can play the game. But I also think it’s okay for games to not compromise their design or vision to make them accessible to everyone in all situations. If House House had done that with Big Walk, it would have made the game less special, and I don’t think I’d still be thinking about its ending hours now, many days after finishing it.

So if you can play Big Walk with some pals in different places on various devices across the web, do it. You’ll have a great time. For everyone else, I hope you get to experience it one day, too. And if a mod comes out that lets you play solo or whatever, avoid it like the plague. Trust me.