Why the Ending of Big Walk Hit So Close to Home (Major Spoilers)

Major spoilers for the game Big Walk ahead.

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Playing Big Walk with my two best friends has left me feeling really emotional—really happy and sad at the same time. I’m so happy I got to play a game with some of my best friends for so many hours, and I’m so glad that we got to goof around and have fun.

It really makes me think about how my friends came into my life. Nate and Chris kind of just fell into my lap when I was in college. It’s one of those things that seems like it happens accidentally—you don’t really have to put any effort into it. And now that we’re out of college—gosh, years out of college—it’s been really hard to stay friends with people who you’re not bumping into every single day. I appreciate how much time they’ve put into spending time together.

Big Walk was an idea that Nate had. He really wanted us to play it. I thought it looked interesting, but I wasn’t sure if it was a game I would enjoy at all. I’m really glad he brought it to our attention. At the beginning I had no idea what I was getting into, and I realized that one of the things the game is trying to teach you is that you need to work together and communicate really well. There are times where you can’t communicate in a way that you’re comfortable with, or you need to make a decision as a group. But there’s not really a way that one person can carry the game or be the best at it, because you’re always having to work together and figure things out together.

I felt so much accomplishment every time we solved a puzzle together—just figuring out where I needed to go without any idea of what I was doing or where I was. I got lost pretty badly the first time we played the game, maybe the second time we played together, and I was really scared for a little bit there. But I knew I could count on my friends to help me figure out what to do, where to go, and how to get out of a mess without me being able to talk to them at all.

The ending of the game is where things really started to hit home for me. The end of the game is kind of scary—not in a terrible way, not in a gory way, not in a jump-scare way. It’s scary in that you’re forced to not be able to communicate even though you can see your friends, and you can’t identify who is who.

There have definitely been times in my life when I didn’t want to talk to anybody and felt like no one was there for me. There have been times when I really needed other people to be there for me and didn’t know what would happen. But my friends were there for me, and they supported me without hesitation, without even a whiff of judgment.

I’ve definitely been challenged by depression for a while now. I feel like I’m a lot better at dealing with it, but there are definitely times where it hits me harder than others. I was extremely uncomfortable talking to anyone about this for the longest time, but everything that happened with me back in 2022 or whatever kind of forced me to realize that I needed my support system to support me.

I always thought of support systems as something that would help you when you could get through things. But I realized that a support system is sometimes your foundation, and you do kind of need them to help you do even the most basic things—which is really hard to admit to yourself, or at least it was really hard for me to admit to myself.

Going through the final puzzles where we couldn’t talk to each other, I didn’t know how we were going to solve some of them without being able to talk. But I had this feeling in my gut that we could, and we did. Honestly, there were some puzzles where I wasn’t getting upset, but I was getting frustrated that I couldn’t tell Nate and Chris what I was trying to do.

There was one where we had to identify which shapes go where. I think I accidentally figured out that I could lay them out in a way that I could memorize or write down the order, and then I could see what the puzzle was and solve it and have them make sure I was doing it right. I needed to trust them that they would tell me what I needed to do, but I think they were trying to help me solve it.

I was like, “Hey, I got this. I know what I’m doing.” So I started picking them up and moving them, sitting down in front of stuff, and grabbing stuff out of people’s hands because I was trying to say, “I got this. I just need you guys to do your part.”

But at the end, when you’re forced to say goodbye to your friends one by one, I think it made me realize that eventually I will have to say goodbye to them. It’s going to be hard to do that in real life, and I’m glad that we got to spend so much time together now. We don’t get to spend a lot of time together in person lately, but I’m hopeful that we’ll be able to do stuff in person again sometime soon.

We definitely had a lot of fun together, and we definitely had a lot of interesting things that we needed to figure out together. But ultimately, just realizing that eventually we all have to say goodbye to the things that we had fun with is the hardest part. I think people are eager to say goodbye to things that are hard, but it’s all part of the whole package, and you have to say goodbye to the whole package all at the same time.

Seeing my friends walk off and not being able to talk to them anymore was hard. In the moment, I didn’t really think anything of it because I was just thinking about the game, and I knew that there would probably be more that we would need to do.

I think just reflecting back on everything made me realize that my friends have always been there for me, even when I couldn’t talk to them, even when I didn’t know what I needed to do. We’re all just figuring it out together, and I’m so appreciative that this game helped me reflect on that and realize it.