An hour of puzzle-solving in the quirky world of Big Walk is the most fun I've had in co-op in ages

You're in the woods at night with a couple of your friends looking at a construction crane towering above you, a tantalizing red button at the top, far out of reach. You have no idea what that red button does, but c'mon. It's a red button. You're not going anywhere until you've figured out how to press it.

Throwing things at it doesn't work, so you move onto the next plan: kicking things at it, which doesn't work even more. In the 45-minute preview I got of Big Walk, the "cooperative online walker-talker" from House House, developer of Untitled Goose Game, it was one of my co-op partners who finally cracked the case: instead of using objects to push the button, could we use each other? We could. We picked each other up, and the three of us, standing on each other's shoulders, could now reach the button easily.

I won't reveal what the purpose of pushing that button was—we didn't realize it for a while ourselves—but it was just the first of a half-dozen or so puzzles we encountered in the game's gentle open world. Like the tower, solving these puzzles required exploration, teamwork, lots of communication, and at least one dance party.

OK, the dance party wasn't required, but like everything else in Big Walk, it was a lot of fun anyway.

I played Big Walk in Portland, Oregon, at publisher Panic's office (developer House House is located in Australia and was not present). After getting our bearings in a minimalist tutorial room, my two co-op partners and I (playing with me were The Verge's senior reporter Jay Peters and the Portland Mercury's arts & culture editor Suzette Smith) wandered off into a world filled with trees, hills, rivers, a day-night cycle—and lots of puzzles.

Big Walk has an immediate goofy charm: players look like bipedal ants (in a cute way) with bulbous bodies supported by noodly legs, plus stretchy arms, big round eyes, and squishy noses that wiggle when you speak into your mic. You can run, hop, sit, wave or point each arm independently, and pick stuff up to carry around. We didn't find any backpacks, so we had to lug objects like lamps and radios around in our hands, which often led to a quick discussion about who was going to carry what as we explored the world.

And discussion is critical: all the puzzles of Big Walk are cooperative. (Sorry, hopeful solos, you will need at least one other person to play with.) One puzzle required one of us to hold down a button while someone else interacted with the item it opened. Another needed two of us to simultaneously throw two different switches. One involved a player standing in a locked room that contained the puzzle solution, while the other two, outside the room, had to physically assemble the solution, communicating only by proximity chat through a small window in the wall.

These puzzles were standalone, yet also part of a bigger puzzle: we found a bridge that was inaccessible, and eventually realized solving the rest of the puzzles in the area would let us cross it. There's no real explanations in the world, no big arrows telling you where to go or what to do next: both the individual puzzles and the bridge puzzle were only solved by observing the situation, telling each other what we'd discovered, coming up with ideas together, and trying them out.

I mean this in the best way: Big Walk is a team-building exercise. Having only proximity chat available meant we had to literally stick together, and needing multiple people to interact with every puzzle meant we were all involved and invested. Much as I love solo puzzle games, working with my teammates was a delight and made each success a little sweeter, knowing we'd all contributed. A puff of confetti accompanied the completion of each puzzle, and darn it, it really felt like we'd earned that little celebration.

Big Walk's puzzles will scale depending on how many people you bring with you, too. That button on the crane we tried to reach would have been lower if there had only been two of us and higher if there had been four players. The game will support up to 12 people at once, though puzzles don't scale that high. Four players is the maximum scale for any puzzle, though I can still see the potential of larger groups in Big Walk: maybe splitting into teams for competitive puzzle solving, having races, playing tag or hide and seek, and other free-form fun.

The world isn't just wall-to-wall puzzles, either. We found a station the publishers of Big Walk call "the salon" where you can grab a giant paint brush, use it to poke a color swatch on a wall, and then paint your friends with it, customizing the segments of your blobby little bodies. Even this act of character customization requires cooperation and communication: you can't paint yourself, you need a friend to do it for you.

Near the end of the session we came across an area by the ocean where speakers were broadcasting chill tunes, and after determining it wasn't part of a puzzle, figured it was just a place to vibe, dance, watch the sun set, and relax by the water. The publishers later confirmed it for us: there was nothing to solve there, it's just a space to hang out, and that's exactly what we wound up doing.

Based on the small slice I got to play, Big Walk is nothing but a good time: puzzles to solve, physics objects to interact with, a cute and colorful world to explore or just hang out in with pals. It's a nice foil to the more chaotic and scary friendslop games like Lethal Company and Content Warning. There's no scares and no screams, but it's just as satisfying to make it through a mysterious world by working together.