The best mini golf game you’ll ever play just got three dino-sized updates
AC thVRsday
In his weekly column, Android Central Senior Content Producer Nick Sutrich delves into all things VR, from new hardware to new games, upcoming technologies, and so much more.
Walkabout Mini Golf is one of the best Meta Quest games ever made, and it’s also the 20th best-selling Meta Quest game. This success has allowed the developers at Mighty Coconut to support it for years, regularly cranking out new courses and features for gamers to play around with.
Today’s release of the latest course, Raptor Cliff’s, marks the culmination of a trio of Walkabout-related announcements, making April 2025 an extra special month for the game. Before that, Mighty Coconut announced it would fold six previous DLC courses into the main game, with a nominal $5 price increase, nearly doubling the number of base courses. That’s $5 total for what used to cost players $4 per course, and existing players are getting that for free.
To round out the festivities, Mighty Coconut partnered with FormX Design to debut the Grip-to-Putter 3, the third generation of my favorite VR golfing accessory. All of this adds up to a splendid month for the best mini golf game you’ll ever play, and all you’ll need is a Meta Quest headset or an iPhone to enjoy it.
The meaning behind the apostrophe
You probably saw “Raptor Cliff’s” and wondered if it was a spelling mistake. I thought the same thing until I walked through the new course with Walkabout’s senior art director, Don Carson, and one of the level designers, Henning Koczy. As it turns out, there’s a very specific reason the apostrophe is in the name.
The reason has a name, and his name is Raptor Cliff. He’s the mascot for the roadside golf course attraction featured in the latest Walkabout Mini Golf DLC, and you can find his picture behind the gift shop, right at the entrance to the course (pictured above). Carson told me the course was designed specifically to evoke the feeling of the roadside attractions along the Northwestern American coast in the 1970s, which he used to visit with his grandparents when he was a kid.
“There’s no anachronism in the gift shop” that makes its theme inherently obvious, but you might draw from the cars on the road that the course doesn’t look like this in 2025. As a roadside attraction, the team wanted to emphasize that “this isn’t Jurassic Park” and that the dinosaurs think you are friends, not food.
That all starts right at the beginning of the course as you putt your way through the middle of a giant redwood tree, only to be greeted by a giant red T-Rex with its tongue hanging out like a dog. Watch him long enough and you’ll see his belly shake as he scratches himself while watching you golf.
“All our dinosaurs are so very well fed that they’re just like big dogs,” Carson told me, which helps allude to the idea that this is not Jurassic Park.
“All our dinosaurs are so very well fed that they’re just like big dogs,” Carson told me, which alludes to the idea that these aren’t scary man-eating lizards like you see in the movies. Several holes feature dinosaurs more prominently, like one where you roll the ball up a Stegosaurus’s back, or another hole where you hit the ball into a Brontosaurus’s mouth and then have to putt between its legs on the next hole below.
There’s even a Triceratops that lets you sit on its back, plus a new zipline mechanic, cars you can ride on (that actually move around the island), and several new mechanics found throughout the course. In one section, I noticed that you had to bounce a ball off a sign to make it to the next part of the hole, and I asked the team how often they build for scenarios that can’t be done in real life.
“A normal golf course wouldn’t really do this. I kind of forget how tame a realistic golf course has to be. You can’t get the ball off the ground for fear of hitting another patron in the head. So this unpredictable bounce off the sign is probably not going to happen in real life.” It’s one of the many reasons I love mini golf in VR, and it’s just the start of what makes this course so special.
A normal golf course wouldn’t really do this. I kind of forget how tame a realistic golf course has to be.
As I was admiring all the little details found in the second caddy shop on the course, Carson told me to keep an eye out for little stories hidden along the way as I progressed through the course. “Emma Mercado, who does all the avatar accessories and avatar heads, also she does a lot of our set decoration, and she imbues so much of the environment with little bits of story.”
Behind the counter in the gift shop at the beginning of the course, you can find a pair of dinosaur slippers and a half-eaten container of fudge that an employee obviously broke into. But the real fun tidbit to learn was that Emma has an almost obsessive interest in placing “jilted love affairs” scattered throughout several courses.
“There was always some vignette somewhere where someone had broken up with someone else. You could tell by the arrangement of props,” Carson told me.
“My favorite being up in the rooftops of Venice. Someone had obviously whipped out an engagement ring and you see the wine’s been knocked over and the flowers have been thrown off the roof and are leaning up against the chimney.”
It all fits so well together in the theme of each course, which Carson told me was specifically planned out to offer something for everyone throughout the year. Course size and complexity are additional considerations made by the team, and while Koczy told me that holes are normally designed to be between 60 and 80 square meters, larger courses like Mount Olympus require a bit more space.
But Raptor Cliff’s was designed to feel cozy and warm, “like a trip to summer camp,” as Carson put it. The warm glow of the sun and the simple joy of a roadside tourist attraction provide a wonderful break for your cramped legs and bored brain, something that, ironically, fits quite well in our modern-day-to-day, where so many of us sit on our rear ends for hours at a time.
The warm glow of the sun and the simple joy of a roadside tourist attraction provide a wonderful break for your cramped legs and bored brain, something that, ironically, fits quite well in our modern day-to-day, where so many of us sit on our rear ends for hours at a time.
Finding the right club
While I’ve named the YOGES Adjustable Length club the best Quest 3 accessory for VR golfers for quite some time, FormX’s new Grip-to-Putter 3 just took its place as the new best. The previous Grip-to-Putter 2 design didn’t work very well for the Quest 3 because the controller is tracked differently than the Quest 2, so FormX went back to the drawing board for the third generation.
While it doesn’t feature the adjustable length feature of the YOGES club, it does offer a more useful feature for Walkabout Mini Golf: a physical grip-to-putt handle. See, Walkabout has this clever in-game feature called grip-to-putt, which makes your club transparent until you hold down the grip button on your controller.
This mechanic allows you to practice your swings without fear of hitting the ball until you’re ready, but it’s not possible to use with a normal golf club controller attachment since you can’t reach the grip button while holding the club handle. The Grip-to-Putter 3 has a little trigger on the handle that you press and hold to activate grip-to-putt functionality, and it works as well as you would hope.
Image 1 of 4
And that’s not the only thing that’s really great here. Most golf club attachments are a bit of a pain to get set up, as you typically have to slide the wrist strap through a tiny hole and wrap it around the handle to keep the controller from flying away. With Grip-to-Putter 3, you just slide the controller into a chamber and lock it in with a little green sliding mechanism. No wrist strap, no custom battery door, no hassle at all.
The one negative thing I found with the design is that when inserting the controller, sometimes it’s easy to push it too far into the chamber. This causes the grip button to be held down, negating the grip-to-putt functionality. It’s an easy enough fix — just pull the controller up a bit until it clicks — but I played through more than half the course before realizing grip-to-putt wasn’t broken because of a game bug, rather because of the physical controller’s positioning.
However, this only happened once, and now that I’m aware of it, it won’t happen again. I love using clubs like this because they add real weight and club physics to your virtual club, which ends up translating into better scores in my experience. If you’re looking for the ultimate Walkabout Mini Golf club attachment for your Meta Quest 3 or Quest 3S, this is the one to get.
When only the best will do, FormX Design’s Grip-to-Putter 3 will give you superpowers that other players wish they had, complete with the real weight of a golf club behind every swing.
Post Comment