2026’s Best Horror Game Isn’t Even A Horror Game

By almost every account, playing Big Walk with your friends is a charming, sweet, and borderline magical experience. It’s a game about exploring, communicating, and collaborating, and it eschews traditional systems familiar in other games. For example, there is nothing in this open-world puzzle-adventure game designed to harm you--no health bars, stamina meters, or any sort of fail state.

So why was I scared while playing Big Walk?

The most obvious source for that fear is the dark. Big Walk has a day and night cycle, and nightfall quickly sneaks up on you. Once you find yourself in pitch-black darkness, you’ll have to depend on artificial sources of light, whether they're nearby lit-up buildings, movable spherical lamps, or flashlights. Possibly the biggest challenge of Big Walk is carrying capacity--you have no inventory to speak of, so you're limited to the one object you can carry in your hands. If you find a backpack or a belt, you can increase that number to two or three, but you'll need someone else to take the items off you. It’s easy to find yourself suddenly unprepared and stumbling in the dark.

And that’s the situation I found myself in multiple times when playing Big Walk with large groups of friends. With no light and only the starry sky and each other’s bright white eyeballs as reference points, navigating the environment becomes turbulent. The terrain ahead of you is unclear, and you risk unknowingly running into a wall at best, or falling down steep inclines at worst. The tension mounts as you contemplate how no one is to blame for these mishaps but yourself, or the dysfunction of your group as a whole. You’re ultimately left with the decision to either brave the darkness, or wait it out until sunrise.

I kept thinking about a classic horror movie when playing Big Walk, one that rational folks probably wouldn’t recall from playing this game. In 1999, The Blair Witch Project made a splash in American pop culture with its then-unconventional found footage style and unprecedented viral marketing campaign. Even if you haven’t seen the movie yourself, the imagery of young twentysomethings running around in the woods at night, and the sounds of their panicked screams, all filtered through a camcorder, are ever familiar.

What stood out about Blair Witch wasn’t its supernatural elements or jerky camera work. It was the large chunk of the film, mostly set during daytime, in which the three doomed characters

. The dialogue, improvised during filming, is uncomfortably realistic, ranging from passive-aggressiveness to downright enraged. Despite the typical scares now ubiquitous with found footage horror, the anxiety from Blair Witch stems from the characters’ cluelessness about their location and the breakdown of their communication.

Of course, when I played Big Walk in a group of eight people last week, our dialogue was a lot more civil by comparison. Our characters didn’t have health or hunger to worry about, and under the cozy blanket of reality, we players were all safe and sound in our own homes. But that didn’t mean I was unafraid when we reached our own moments of helplessness.

Among the eight of us, we had one backpack, a laser pointer, binoculars, and a pile of those red thingamajigs you earn from solving puzzles. I was holding one of two walkie-talkies, and it quickly became evident that we were unprepared for the dark.

As our little herd was on the move and the sun began to set, I tried to take a headcount from the back of the group. I counted one short. Not seeing my fiancé in the pack, confusion gave way to slight panic. I asked the group where he was but got no clear response, so I hastily announced through my walkie-talkie that I was falling back to wait for him. Shortly after, night fell, and with it my ability to see a round-bodied soul anywhere. When it became clear my fiancé wasn’t coming my way, I desperately continued on to try to find the group. I kept talking through the walkie, and was met with only muffled replies--though any crumb of human connection still brought me comfort. As my friend was constantly shooting up flares, I was able to follow the trail and reunite with the group, most of whom had been unaware of my absence.

It turns out, my fiancé was with the group the entire time--we just couldn’t hear each other across distance and through everyone else’s conversations. Finding the larger group provided immense relief, even though we were still directionless as a unit.

Countless video games have you wandering the woods in the dark. I’ve fought the Taken in Bright Falls across both Alan Wake games; I waded through the fog of the Lost Woods in Breath of the Wild; I even once hung out with a dog when I briefly tried the 2019 Blair Witch video game. But Big Walk--despite its silly-shaped character models and whimsical vibes--felt closer to life than any of those other games, and that realistic situation of losing direction and lacking the whereabouts of a loved one activated fear more effectively than any jump scare or creepy laugh could provoke.

What makes Big Walk so scary is that I found myself in situations that were of my own creation. The game’s systems and design bear some of the responsibility for the faulty communications and limitations that led to my mishaps, but that isn’t to say the game is flawed for those reasons. Virtual playgrounds and sandboxes like Big Walk are designed fully knowing what can and will go wrong when people play. The rules are clear, as are any consequences, and a crucial part of the Big Walk experience is figuring out how to get back on track when you find yourself lost in the dark, when you drop and lose items, and when you have no sense of direction.

While horror games might have you run away from the monsters or unload bullets onto them, the solution for combating fear in Big Walk is the same teamwork and solidarity it takes to solve puzzles. When you’re lost and communicating ineffectively, it’s up to you to get back on the trail and patch those communication holes. If anything, defeating the horror of the unknown with your friends in Big Walk is part of what makes that game so sweet.