Big Walk Puzzles Guide: Every Puzzle Type & How to Solve

Updated 2026-09-03 · Steam Big Walk

Big Walk puzzles are the game's only real source of gourds, and almost every one of them is built so that a single player physically cannot finish it alone. The pattern repeats all over the island: information sits on one side of a soundproof wall or a stretch of open ground, the button or the slot sits on the other, and the only bridge between them is your voice, a hand signal or a comms item. Gourds feed a tower's dispensary, a full dispensary hands you a key, and each key opens one more piece of the island. This page covers the puzzle families documented so far, the four puzzles that drop the drawbridge, and all seven purple challenge puzzles.

Two naming notes before anything else. The community Fandom wiki calls the puzzle reward a gourd and says the word comes from the game's own developer files, while most Steam guide authors call the same object a blorb. They are the same pickup. Solutions below that come from Steam Community guides are player-tested writeups, not official House House documentation, and are labelled as such.

How the puzzle loop actually works

Puzzles do not unlock areas directly. They feed a chain, and knowing the chain saves you a lot of wandering.

Step	What happens	Source
1. Solve a puzzle	It releases one gourd	Fandom Puzzles page
2. Fill a dispensary	Carry gourds to a tower and fill every slot there	Fandom Towers page
3. Collect the key	A full dispensary produces one key, unique to that tower	Fandom Key page
4. File the key	Feed it through five separate key filers; each one trims a peg and then points an arrow at the next filer	Fandom Miscellaneous page
5. Use the key	Take the finished key to its matching lock	Player-tested, 100% guide

Counts come from the player-written 100% achievement guide: the Starting Area asks for four gourds to open the drawbridge, each of the four coloured towers asks for five, and the Black Obelisk asks for six once the other five key chains are done. That same guide reports a late-game step where a further 15 gourds go to a green building near the tutorial and map area to produce a white key, plus eight extra red gourds that exist beyond the 30 spent on the main keys. All of that is one player group's account rather than an official checklist.

What each key opens is summarised on towers: red for the Map Room, green for the chairlift, yellow for the tunnel network, blue for the trains, black for the endgame. See items for the gourd, key and filer entries in full.

Island puzzle types and how they are solved

The Fandom Puzzles page documents seven named puzzle setups on the main island. They are worth reading as types rather than as a list, because near-identical variants of each turn up elsewhere on the map.

Puzzle	What it looks like	The cooperative trick
Timing Switches	A large green cylinder ringed with buttons on its pillars	Everyone presses at roughly the same moment, so you need a shared count
Crane	A tall yellow crane with a single button out of reach	Players stack on each other to get someone high enough
Symbol Pegs	A blue structure with a sealed room and an outdoor wall of peg slots	One player reads the symbol layout inside and describes it; the outside team pegs it and presses the button
Remote Button	A gourd sealed in a glass cage	A button on a red ledge across the Starting Area holds the cage open while someone grabs the gourd
Remote Button 2	The same cage, with "4166 1899" written above it	Those digits are coordinates: take the GPS to that spot, hold the button there, and the cage stays open only while it is held
Timer	A yellow platform with a receptacle and a cannon-like launcher	The launched object is on a fuse; kick it back to the receptacle before it goes off
Soundproof	A green earthy structure with a button wall outside and a soundproofed room with glowing shapes inside	Each shape maps to a button; the person inside signals which one without speaking, over several rounds

Three details in there decide most failed attempts. The symbol peg room resets its code if the inside player steps out, so whoever is inside stays put until the gourd actually drops. The remote button cages are hold-to-open, not toggle, which means one player is parked on a button doing nothing while the rest work. And latch doors, which the Fandom wiki notes appear in many puzzles as well as in tower entrances, are soundproof by design and often paired so that opening one flips a nearby one.

The four drawbridge puzzles

The raised drawbridge is the first wall the game puts in front of you. A Steam guide dedicated to it lists four puzzles clustered near the Beach Tower area, and players report these are the four gourds the Starting Area key needs:

Crane puzzle, close to the tutorial exit.
Spyglass puzzle, on the mountain path to the right of Beach Tower.
Blue House puzzle, over on the far-left mountain side of the starter zone.
Green Scaffolding puzzle, immediately right of the Blue House one.

That guide hosts its step-by-step solutions on an external site rather than on the Steam page itself, so this wiki lists the locations it names and does not invent the steps. Once the four gourds are in, the key is filed at five filers and dropped into the slot at the red drawbridge.

One more location is worth flagging even though its solution is not sourced: a Steam guide points at a green platform puzzle near Blue Tower, around map coordinates 3560, 2040, with a chair, headphones hanging off its back, a brown radio receiver and a red button you can reach while seated. The setup is documented; the actual solution sits on an external site, so treat it as not confirmed yet here.

The seven purple challenge puzzles

Purple gourds come from a separate challenge area on the far east ridge, reached by chairlift and entered through a purple tunnel to your right as you step off. The tunnel door opens after you finish the game, and the challenges then appear on the big map. A player-written advice guide covers all seven:

Challenge	Player-tested advice
Wait 30 Minutes House	Shut yourself in and wait out the timer; a shorter 5-minute version exists on the main island
Golf	The hole is on the ridge but the ball is not, so it has to be hand-passed or shoved across the island and up the chairlift. Do not carry it onto a lift you cannot exit cleanly
36 Drawings	A description puzzle. Get all 36 tiles off the rack and visible, then interrogate details: outlines versus solid fills, how many petals, and so on. Track which answers you are sure of
9 Speakers, No Talking	The hardest one for that group. They mapped the nine sounds onto rows and signalled positions with a pre-agreed hand code
9 Symbols, No Talking	The same puzzle with visuals instead of audio, solved with the same pre-agreed gesture system. A commenter notes a gap in the shadows on the dividing wall
Platforming, But Fast	A timed rerun of the island platforming challenge while carrying an egg timer. Throw the timer early, jump gaps rather than following the zig-zag, and split roles so only one player runs the finish
Many Lights Everywhere	The spotter only has a red flash button, so run it as yes/no questioning: one flash yes, two flashes no, a burst to abort. Narrow by wall, then by cluster, then by light, five times over

The recurring lesson across all seven is the same one that guide gives as general advice: agree on a gesture vocabulary early and reuse it, because the same signals carry across puzzle types. hand signals goes deeper on that.

Tools that make puzzles easier

Nothing here is required, but several items in items exist specifically to beat the game's communication limits.

Walkie-talkies give two players unlimited-range voice and text, which suits any puzzle split across long distances. They take your one hand slot, so a pair usually splits a set.
Megaphones push your voice much further than default proximity chat. Patch 1.5.1 on 28 August 2026 explicitly increased that reach. Spots are listed on megaphone locations.
Whiteboards let you type, which beats describing an odd symbol out loud.
GPS is what makes the 4166 1899 coordinate puzzle solvable at all, and the compass and map from the Map Room turn vague directions into headings.
Laser pointers and binoculars let one player mark a target the other cannot describe.
Backpacks and hip bags add carry slots, but a second player has to attach and remove them for you.

The 100% guide also reports a purely physical trick: teammates can grab each other and chain grabs upward to reach ledges that look out of bounds. That is player-tested, not an official mechanic.

Patches that changed puzzles

Puzzle bugs have been a real theme in House House's post-launch patches, so a challenge that seems broken may genuinely have been broken.

Patch	Date	Puzzle-relevant change
1.5.1	28 Aug 2026	Fixed saves made before 1.4.9 where a challenge could reset after completion and become impossible to finish. Also fixed picking up a player through a turnstile, some confetti launchers not firing, and a disconnect leaving a drawn-symbol peg on the wrong side of a wall
1.5.0	26 Aug 2026	Collision restored on one patch of trees
1.4.9	shipped with the 21 Aug 2026 notes	Fixed a missing collider in one challenge, fixed completed challenges asking to be redone after a reload, and stopped two players sharing one turnstile

If a challenge in an old save still refuses to register, that 1.5.1 line is the first thing to check. Full history is on patch notes.

Sources and last check

Checked 3 September 2026. The seven island puzzle types, the gourd and key chain, the five-filer requirement and the soundproof latch door behaviour come from the community Fandom wiki pages for Puzzles, Key, Towers, Items and Miscellaneous at big-walk-game.fandom.com, which is player-written and unofficial.

Gourd counts per tower, the late-game white key step, the chained-grab climbing trick and every purple challenge tip come from two Steam Community guides by the same author: the 100% achievement guide and the challenge puzzles advice guide. Both are that group's own playthrough, explicitly written from memory in places, so treat them as player-reported rather than authoritative. The four drawbridge puzzle locations come from a drawbridge guide and the Blue Tower green platform setup from a headphone puzzle guide; both host their actual solutions off Steam, so those solutions are marked not confirmed yet here rather than guessed at.

Patch details are from the official House House Steam announcements for 1.5.1 on 28 August 2026 and for 1.4.10 and 1.4.9 on 21 August 2026, which are the only authoritative source used on this page.