Hey, What Do You Call This Item?

Hey, what do you call this item?

© House House

This is an item in the game Big Walk. It is one of the most important items in the game. You receive one of these for almost every puzzle you solve, and when used in the right location, these items unlock new areas and other cool things.

© House House

But Big Walk doesn’t have an “inventory” in the way you might imagine. In Big Walk, you can pick up and hold one item at a time in your hands (maybe you can cart around some items in other ways too, shh!), but there’s no text saying what that item’s name is. Items are just whatever you happen to call them.

© House House

It normally might not matter what you, in your head, call a nondescript shape, but in Big Walk it very much matters. Big Walk is a game about communication, and is intended to be played with 2-12 people. So if you’re playing Big Walk, at some point, you’re going to have to give this item a name and say it out loud in such a way as to be understood by your compatriots.

© House House

In our group, we called these items “nipples,” a name I regretted almost immediately. We called them this because my partner (Restart.run‘s own Imran Khan) attended a preview event in which he repeatedly called the item a nipple and allegedly exasperated the devs. I wonder why.

I asked some other folks who had already played Big Walk what they called this item, and got some great responses. My favorite by far was the several people (including the folks over at Eurogamer) who accurately identified that it looks a lot like a Kong-brand dog chew toy:

Giovanni Colantonio and his group of reviewers over at Polygon referred to this thing as a “baby” to great hilarity:

Jake Steinberg went with the much more straightforward “red heads”:

Lewis Gordon for The Guardian had a similarly color-focused name:

Jesse Vitelli, also at Restart.Run, called them “gourds,” alongside Game Informer‘s Eric Van Allen:

Giant Bomb kept things simple:

I found a few other examples among the reviews, including the excellent “jelly baby” from PCGamesN and “eggy things” from GameSpot (GameSpot also referred to the similarly nameless characters as “Walklings” which I found quite charming).

© House House

Please let me know in the comments what you call this item. I have reached out to House House to find out what they call it. Presumably not “nipple.”