A Damn Fine Cup of Culture

One of the things that video games can do magnificently is create worlds. These posts are an occasional exploration of games that I love because of where they take me.

When I started getting into Virtual Reality with the release of the first consumer-grade Oculus Rift in 2016, the kind of games I was expecting I’d eventually play in VR were ones where I’d sit in the cockpit of a spaceship, plane or racing car, or where I’d run around exploring mysteries and fighting or evading enemies. I expected games that were pretty much like what I’d been playing on PC for decades, just more immersive, more focused on the experience of being there, in the virtual world.

What I didn’t expect: that some of my favourite VR experiences by far would be hanging out with friends and trying to get a small ball to go in a smaller hole.

Walkabout Mini Golf is an easy game to underestimate, already from its title. Miniature golf: that’s not exactly exciting, is it? Many will have memories of playing mini golf (or “crazy golf”, as my mother used to call it) with parents and grandparents. It’s one of the easiest, mildest, safest forms of fun there is, even if you’re drunk, stoned and/or very much a nerd. Regular golf is already not particularly sexy, but mini golf is pretty much the height of twee mundanity – which is perhaps underlined by how much the game is about geometry and therefore maths. You hit a ball, it hits a wall or an obstacle, the angle at which it hits is equal to the angle at which it is reflected.

Simple – but, obviously, knowing the maths isn’t the same as being able to put it into practice. And that’s where a game of mini golf can become surprisingly tense: the worse you do, the more pressure mounts, and the worse you’re likely to do yet again. Mini golf is about finding that moment of zen that allows you to turn the putter just so, apply just the right amount of force, and then seeing the ball zig-zag across the green while in your head that meme with the angles and formulas goes off. Simple math that suddenly becomes much more hardcore.

But that still doesn’t explain why I would consider a mini golf game to be one of my favourite VR experiences, right? Well, there are two main reasons for that, one simple one, the other a bit less so. Most gamers are well aware that playing with others can be so much more fun than playing on your own, and I’ve been playing Walkabout Mini Golf with friends that I’ve played online games with for over a decade. Plus, mini golf is a good way of hanging out, as it’s not hyper-stressful, and much of the time you’re standing around watching others play. It’s relaxing and mellow, which makes for a great way of spending an hour or two in VR. (It helps not to be hyper-competitive, which is a good way of ruining most things.)

But this is where we get to Walkabout Mini Golf itself. The game, created by the wonderfully-named company Mighty Coconut, makes an amiable enough first impression: you find yourself on a small tropical island, there’s a shack in front of you where you pick your putter, ball and course, there are some islands around you with practice holes. Everything is pretty easy and intuitive, the graphics are simple but clean and effective, and if you’re going to play mini golf, you might as well start on a sunny island. The only thing that’s missing is a nice, cool drink in your hand, but that’s something VR hasn’t yet succeeded at doing in any convincing way.

What definitely helps is that there is little to no abstraction involved in playing Walkabout Mini Golf. Other than the putter in your hand not being physical, playing mini golf in VR is pretty much the same as playing mini golf in the real world: you hit the ball with the putter until it goes in the hole. The first few courses are simple enough: a pirate island complete with a fort, caves and treasures, an extended Japanese garden surrounded by mountains, a haunted house. Simple, but fun, and with lots of incidental details, which bring these environments to life. But then the courses become more daring, adding the kind of verticality that would be difficult to do well in the real world: for instance with Arizona Modern, which situates its course alongside a mesa, and if your ball veers off course, it’ll drop a few hundred metres – so it’s good that you don’t have to go after it yourself. But Mighty Coconut design isn’t just unusual for mini golf, it’s elegant and evocative: the holes are challenging but rarely frustrating (provided that you practice on the more basic courses first), but the level designers pack an amazing amount of atmosphere into their courses. These all have a more challenging hard version, which in the case of Arizona Modern includes a change from bright daylight to night, and the course receives moody lighting. Add to all of this the game’s fantastic soundscape and music, a mellow, melancholy tune heavy on slide guitar, and you may find that you forget there’s a hole to be played: you just hang out on the mesa and look out towards where the sun has just set. (The vibe nicely offsets the challenge of the course.)

Other courses included in the base game are set on a space station, in a small western town complete with a gold mine, the windswept cliffs of a Hebridean island – but that’s just the beginning: Mighty Coconut has released dozens of downloadable courses, from the jazzy Big Apple-meets-Escher stylings of Upside Town via more mythical environments such as Alfheim, Shangri-La and Atlantis, to licensed themes such as Jim Henson’s Labyrinth (complete with the guards’ riddle and the farting Bog of Eternal Stench) or Wallace and Gromit’s home at West Wallaby Street. Mighty Coconut have consistently done a great job at capturing the vibe of their theme, not just visually but also in the design of the 18 holes: in Upside Town you may find that the ball defies gravity and the green is positioned sideways on a wall or on the ceiling above you, and in the Wallace and Gromit-themed level you have to contend with a number of cracking contraptions that more often than not don’t quite work the way they’re intended – and the malfunctioning gizmos are an integral part of the course design. And, again, even just exploring the house at West Wallaby Street, without hitting a single ball, is a joy – and more so in VR. (The designers’ love for detail goes so far that Wallace and Gromit themselves, who pop up throughout the course, are animated in a style reminiscent of their stop-motion origins.)

It seems that Mighty Coconut is nowhere near running out of ideas, with courses going with a Bond villain-style theme and others taking players to a small slice of Venice or to an Elvis-themed Las Vegas extravaganza, but perhaps my favourite Walkabout Mini Golf course to date is the one released last year, just in time for Christmas: Holiday Hideaway, which places its players in a cosy log cabin decorated for the holidays – but the twist is: you’re the size of a mouse, with a fireplace and a Christmas tree towering over you. As a mini golf player in the truest sense of the word, you can check out the cookie and milk put out for Santa, the little toy train, the decorations on the tree, you can hop over to the mantle and mingle with the miniature townspeople on the Dickensian diorama, all the while a soothing, strangely melancholy Christmas tune plays. And if you pick the hard version of the course, you find that it’s the day after: the cookie’s been eaten, the glass of milk is empty, and discarded gift wrappers and the like make the course more challenging.

I’m not saying I don’t want to fly spaceships in VR, or sneak around space stations, or shoot at enemy soldiers in frantic firefights. But Walkabout Mini Golf shows that Mighty Coconut understand what VR can do best in 2025, what it’s perhaps less good at, and how to use that knowledge to design a game that could conceivably work outside VR but that is so much better when you’re in there, standing next to Gromit, or navigating the Bog of Eternal Stench, or crossing picturesque bridges over Venice canals, or hitting the ball just a bit too hard so it goes flying over the side of the mesa. You’ll curse under your breath, but then you look out across the landscape, listen to the crickets and the birds, see the oranges and reds of the setting sun, and you forget for a moment that you’re in your bedroom, wearing a silly-looking headset. Until the friends you’re playing with remind you: it’s your turn… and you just have one more chance to make par.