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In the modern gaming landscape, achieving 100% completion often involves a predictable, exhausting checklist. It usually requires scouring a mini-map for hundreds of identical glowing icons, consulting external wikis for hidden collectibles, and enduring hours of repetitive tasks long after the core narrative has concluded. However, Big Walk—the latest cooperative masterpiece from the creators of Untitled Goose Game—completely subverts this expectation. Reaching the absolute end of what this game has to offer is not a test of your patience, but rather a profound, emotional journey that fundamentally alters how you communicate with your co-op partner.
Recently, a player on the official /r/BigWalk subreddit shared their experience of reaching the 100% milestone with their best buddy. Their reflection wasn’t about the difficulty of a specific puzzle or the location of a hidden item. Instead, they wrote: “I’ve never had a game make me feel the things I felt playing Big Walk. It’s so subtle yet so powerful you can’t help but be in awe at the immense simple beauty of traveling with a friend. The nuance is in the journey.” This sentiment is echoing across the community as more dedicated pairs cross the finish line, realizing that the true reward of completing the game is the shared history they have built along the way.
To understand the weight of this achievement, we have to look at the timeline of a typical playthrough. As we noted in our breakdown of how long to beat Big Walk, most players reach the initial credits rolling at around the 17-hour mark. During these initial hours, the gameplay is often chaotic. You are learning the physics, struggling to understand the limits of the distance voice chat, and probably yelling into your walkie-talkie more often than not. The early game is defined by confusion, accidental separation, and the frantic joy of figuring out how the world’s basic logic operates.
But what happens after those 17 hours? For players pursuing the 100% completion mark, the game transitions into an entirely different beast. The remaining puzzles are significantly more obscure and require a mastery of the game’s mechanics that you can only develop through deep, sustained cooperation. We have previously detailed some of these late-game challenges in our guide on conquering Big Walk’s most difficult puzzles, but reading a guide cannot prepare you for the emotional shift that occurs between two players.
By the time you are closing in on the final few secrets scattered across the massive Wilsons Promontory-inspired map, you and your partner will have developed a unique, almost telepathic shorthand. The frantic yelling of the early hours is replaced by a calm, methodical rhythm. You no longer need to explain how to triangulate a position; a simple ping of the walkie-talkie and a two-word description of a landmark are enough for your partner to completely understand your intent. You learn each other’s navigation habits. You know that if your friend goes quiet, they are likely investigating a suspicious rock formation, and you inherently know whether to wait or to follow their trail.
This evolution of communication is where the “nuance in the journey” truly lies. Big Walk does not have a traditional narrative. There are no cinematic cutscenes explaining the lore of the island, and no dramatic voice acting to tell you how to feel. The story of Big Walk is entirely player-generated. The memories you create—the time you spent thirty minutes trying to retrieve a lost backpack from a river, or the moment you both stood silently on a cliff watching the sunrise after solving a brutal puzzle—become the narrative fabric of your specific playthrough. If you are struggling with some of the game’s basic mechanics, you can always refer back to our beginners guide to ensure you have a solid foundation before tackling the endgame.
For those aspiring to join the ranks of the 100% completionists, the approach requires a shift in mindset. Because the game actively refuses to provide you with a checklist or a detailed map, tracking your progress requires genuine effort. Many successful duos report using physical notebooks in the real world, or heavily utilizing the in-game whiteboards to sketch out areas they have thoroughly swept versus areas that remain unexplored. You have to treat the environment with immense respect. Every odd arrangement of sticks, every slightly misaligned boulder, and every faint noise echoing through the trees could be a clue.
Furthermore, you must fully embrace the downtime. Fully completing Big Walk means you will spend hours simply walking. In any other game, this might be considered tedious “dead air.” But House House has designed the ambient soundscape and the visual fidelity of the bushland to be actively soothing. These long stretches of walking provide a space for real, human conversation. Players find themselves discussing their real lives, their anxieties, and their hopes while their digital avatars trudge through the mud. The game acts as a pressure valve, a digital hiking trail that facilitates the kind of deep, wandering conversations that are increasingly rare in our hyper-connected, fast-paced world.
Ultimately, the Reddit user is entirely correct: putting this game into words will only give you a surface-level perspective. The emotional weight of hitting 100% in Big Walk doesn’t come from unlocking a shiny platinum trophy on your PS5 or seeing a stat screen tick over to a three-digit number. It comes from the realization that you and your friend have completely conquered an alien landscape through nothing but mutual trust, patience, and the sound of each other’s voices. It is a masterclass in cooperative game design, and a beautiful reminder of why we play multiplayer games in the first place.