Walkabout Mini Golf Just Gave Me a Do-Over Button. I Am Not Sure I Want One.

There is a button on your wrist now that takes a putt back.

Escape from Planet Xylodon went live this morning at $4.99, and on paper it is the most ordinary thing Mighty Coconut ships. Thirty-six holes, eighteen easy and eighteen hard. Eighteen lost balls tucked into the scenery. One collectible putter, a limited-time takeover of Welcome Island, two new avatar heads and five sci-fi accessories for the default one. The premise is a distress beacon from a research team that went quiet on a planet with extremely enthusiastic plant life. By the running count this site has kept since Gloop Lair was number 41, that makes 42.

The course is not the part of today's patch notes I keep rereading.

A do-over you can configure

Mulligans are in. Mighty Coconut's release notes put the control in two places: you set how many each player gets in the course options when you pick a course, or from the expanded scorecard as a modifier. Then you putt, you watch it go somewhere stupid, you look at your wrist display, and you press Mulligan.

My first reaction was that this is not golf. I have never taken a mulligan on a real course in my life and I did not expect to want one here. My second reaction took longer and went the other way, because Walkabout has never really been golf. In August I wrote up Mighty Coconut's own retrospective number, that more than 55 percent of the game's VR sessions are multiplayer, and that figure explains why this thing has lasted six years while so much better-funded social VR did not. What decides whether a lobby comes back is whether everyone is still enjoying themselves on hole 14. A player who shanks three in a row and goes quiet is a genuine problem for a game that runs on people showing up again on Thursday.

So the part I actually like is not the mulligan itself. It is that the count is a lobby setting rather than a rule. A room that wants a clean card sets it to zero and nothing has changed. A room where somebody's partner is playing their second ever round sets it to three. Mighty Coconut has been doing this quietly for years, handing the host a dial instead of deciding for everybody.

Hand tracking, in a game that is entirely a grip

The other addition is experimental hand tracking, and it is Quest only. You enable it in the in-game Settings under the Options tab, you need hand tracking switched on at the system level too, and there is a tutorial before the game turns you loose. The studio calls the feature very experimental and warns about bugs in the same paragraph that announces it, which I would rather have than a confident rollout that falls over on day two.

I have not tried the hand tracking build yet, so what follows is a question and not a verdict. Walkabout's skill expression lives almost entirely in the grip and the swing. Not aim, exactly. Touch. The gap between a putt that dies two feet short and one that drops is small enough that the game ships a custom grip calibration system, and that system is what I would be watching.

Which makes a line further down the same notes worth sitting with. Under known issues, Mighty Coconut says the Grip-to-Puppet behavior is still finicky on SteamVR depending on which controller you hold, and names the Index controllers specifically. Under fixes, there is a separate entry about SteamVR players losing their custom grip calibration outright. On Quest the studio is shipping an input mode with no controller in it at all, while on SteamVR it is still working out how the controller maps to a hand. Beat Saber Flux went through its own version of this in September, and precision rhythm and precision putting have more in common than either camp would like to admit.

The rest of the patch

Several other things arrived alongside the course. There is a promotional code system now, so the studio can hand out cosmetics through codes you redeem in game, with the first one going out through its newsletter. Private room hosts can kick a player, and a host who blocks someone bars them from every private room that host opens, which is a sharper moderation tool than most social VR gives you. Quick Match no longer penalizes a player for quitting a room that had already been abandoned. Voice chat should drop less often. Gloop Lair's bananas have proper lighting again.

Ten days

Ten days ago Mighty Coconut said it was cutting ten more jobs, its second round this year, taking more than a third of the team that survived the first one. The reason given was that new players were not arriving fast enough to sustain the scale the studio had been working at. Today it shipped a course, a scoring option, an input method and a moderation tool. The base game is $24.99 on Steam.

I do not have a tidy reading of that. Nobody builds a feature list this long in the ten days after a round of layoffs, so most of it was finished well before September 28, and the people who finished it are some of the people leaving. What I can tell you is that course 42 landed on the day it was promised, which is more than the year has given most of the studios I have written about.

Set your mulligans to zero. Or do not. That is the whole point of putting it in the options.