Big Walk Not Working

Big Walk is online-only, voice-driven and host-authoritative, which means most problems fall into one of two buckets: the microphone chain, or the host. Everything below comes from House House’s own troubleshooting answers, in the order they give them.

If your friend’s session is not appearing in the list at all, that is a joining problem rather than a fault — see the join code page.

Start at Settings > Audio and look at Microphone Activity. If the meter bounces when you talk, the game is receiving input and the problem is elsewhere. If it does not:

1. Test the microphone in another application to confirm it works at all.
2. Make sure it is plugged in fully. House House’s own note on this: “Hey, it happens.”
3. Check the physical mute switch on the device or headset, and lower your boom mic if you have one.
4. Check Settings > Audio > Mute Mode. If it is set to “hold”, you must hold a button to transmit — this is the most common cause of a microphone that looks broken and is not.
5. Make sure nobody has been silenced in the in-game moderation menu.

1. Confirm other apps or sites — the official example is YouTube — are playing audio normally.
2. Go to Settings > Audio and confirm Volume is turned up.
3. If it persists, House House ask you to contact them at help@bigwalk.game.

Worth ruling out separately: proximity chat means silence is sometimes correct. If you cannot hear one specific player, check whether they are far away, behind a wall, or on the other side of soundproof glass before treating it as a fault.

This is feedback — someone’s microphone is picking up voices from their own speakers.

Find the source by having each player mute themselves in turn until the doubling stops. Whoever it is should either mute when not talking or, better, switch to headphones. Big Walk’s voice system already adds echo deliberately in corridors, so genuine feedback on top of that gets confusing quickly.

If characters are “jittery or laggy or skipping around,” House House class this as a networking issue and give this order:

1. Quit other network-heavy programs, and shut down devices on the network doing heavy transfers.
2. Move closer to the wireless router.
3. If possible, go wired — connect via ethernet.

Then the two non-obvious causes, both stated officially:

• A low graphics frame rate can cause network issues — including your own.
• The host’s frame rate affects everyone. “If all players on a game are experiencing network issues, it may be that the host is having network troubles.” Their suggested fixes are to have the host lower their quality settings, or to have a different player host entirely.

So if the whole session is stuttering, ask the host what frame rate they are getting before anyone reboots a router.

House House’s stated sequence for improving performance:

1. Settings > Graphics > Render Scale — lower it. Reduces GPU load.
2. Settings > Graphics > Quality — lower it. Reduces CPU and GPU load.
3. Raise Render Scale back up gradually.

The point is balancing CPU against GPU rather than turning everything down at once. If you are hosting, do this before the session rather than during it.

Minimum and recommended specs are on the system requirements page.

If part of the world seems wrong — House House’s own example is “the ocean is missing” — update your graphics drivers to the latest version. This is their entire answer for that class of problem, and it is a rendering fault rather than a save or session fault.

Separately, if a controller is not working: test it on a controller testing site such as controllertest.io, and disconnect other peripherals in case one is conflicting.

Several things people report as bugs are the game working as designed. Ruling these out first saves an evening.

“I cannot hear a specific player.” Proximity voice fades with distance, muffles through walls and stops entirely at range. Silence is often correct. Check where they are before checking your audio settings.

“My friend cannot join and there is no session listed.” The host must start playing first — sessions do not exist until the host creates one. If the host has not launched, there is nothing to join.

“There is no single-player mode.” Correct. House House: “No, sorry.” You can walk around alone briefly but will not get far.

“There is no matchmaking.” Also correct and deliberate. Big Walk is built for the same group across multiple sessions.

“My progress is gone.” Check who hosted last time. The save lives on that machine only, and a session started by anyone else begins a new run.

“I cannot see my friend’s game on the Mac App Store version.” That build has no Game Center support and will never show a friends-games list. Use a join code.

If a problem survives the official steps above, the studio takes mail at help@bigwalk.game. They ask for contact on two categories specifically: audio that will not work after their checklist, and accessibility features you need that do not exist yet.

Press enquiries go to press@bigwalk.game instead. Purchases, refunds and subscription problems go to the storefront you bought from — Steam, the Mac App Store, PlayStation Store or Nintendo eShop — since House House cannot process any of those.