Mini Mini Golf Golf Review - Gamecritics.com

Saving The Environment, Putt By Putt

HIGH Actual live-action video conversations with the developers

LOW Sometimes the music can be too loud in the golf sections

WTF This entire game is a WTF moment.

Mini Mini Golf Golf is the first time I’ve ever played a game that felt like the developers were talking directly to me. It’s an experimental title that bleeds the boundaries between player and developer in a beautiful digital symphony that’s disguised as a mini golf game.

The player starts as a worker at an environmental company, Axonia. I began in a dimly-lit room in front of two monitors — one playing a recycled, staticky video feed, and one blank with some tape with the word “data” written on it.

As a “resonant” at Axonia, the player must investigate a breakthrough solution for the world’s rapidly-rising sea levels developed by a rival company, Obrist. A secret project seemingly went up in flames, and the reason why is located in the data extracted from Obrist’s video feed.

The catch? The “data” is a mini golf game. Adjusting a dial on the first monitor plays a video of the Obrist project, a facility located deep within the Earth’s mantle that manually feeds artificial tectonic plates into the sea. The project’s “data” on the second screen is portrayed like something out of a putt-putt course, similar to something one might play with friends on a weekend.

I could go through the courses by manipulating a cursor to hit the ball while shooting for a low score on each hole, and it all seemed fairly standard… until I found that the valuable data that I was supposed to be looking for was locked behind the game.

“Locked behind” is perhaps not the right phrase. The data is physically intertwined with the architecture of each golf course, comprised of fragments of a larger network of memories left behind by a single worker at Obrist, named Vanya. The only way to tell Vanya’s story, and the story of what happened to the tectonic plate station, is held behind each of the eight holes.

The golf courses in Mini Mini Golf Golf are plain, visually designed like something out of a late ’90s computer title that my parents might’ve played on Windows XP. Just a few simple hills, obstacles like windmills here and there, but none pose any challenge.

Yet this sparse gameplay in Mini Mini Golf Golf presents an interesting puzzle — find a way to glitch out the course to access a memory from Vanya.

Each solution is in the video feeds, told directly through conversations with hosts of a makeshift talk show called “Mini Mini Talk Talk” that plays on the left monitor. A few solutions would be to get a hole-in-one, shoot the ball out of the course, or barely miss the hole exactly three times. Afterwards, the level breaks down in a digital cacophony.

Behind each glitched out level is a golf course stripped bare, with only multicolored skeletons of courses and grid patterns to point the way. Each shot towards the hole reveals a letter, and these letters spell out messages from Vanya that explain their work in the tectonic plate station.

Each golf level successfully glitched “unlocks” a chapter of their life, whether it be relationships, work or early childhood. However, by only obtaining it by glitching out of each level, it felt like information that I wasn’t supposed to see. Every victory felt like I was physically breaking the system down, with the sounds of shattering behind each message from Vanya that I had found. It felt like I was an unwelcome guest in Vanya’s mind.

Without spoilers, Vanya’s life was full of heartbreak and contradiction, yet their personal issues have to take a backseat to the world-saving potential of their work. Another portion of these memories tell the story of the tectonic plate station, and how the project gradually became unstable.

Ultimately, Mini Mini Golf Golf is about deciding whether saving the world is a human goal or a capitalistic one — or both. Various news clips play on the video monitor claiming companies like Axonia and Obrist are failing at their jobs to save the environment, yet Vanya believes there needs to be a human component in the solution to the rapidly-deteriorating climate.

Impossibly, somehow, all of this plot took a backseat to the real gem of Mini Mini Golf Golf — the “Mini Mini Talk Talk” talk show. Instead of hiring actors to tell the player solutions through hidden messages on the feed, the actual developers from 3 More Years are the ones talking to the player.

The meat of the talk show is about these devs using games as a time capsule for different points in their lives and how they’re currently using Mini Mini Golf Golf as a medium for disobedience. It’s easily the most direct example that I could find of a developer telling the player directly what the content is about, so that no amount of subjectivity obscures the Mini Mini Golf Golf’s true message. Mini Mini Golf Golf is about environmentalism and capitalism and how their combination might spell the end of the earth.

This title is a message of why ultimately this conflict will strip humanity from everyone, and why collective action is needed for real change.

Mini Mini Golf Golf is the most experimental gaming experience I’ve played in the past decade — and its message made every level worth savoring. It’s also an open conversation to the player from its developers, and it’s a conversation worth listening to.

Rating: 9.5 out of 10

— Jack Dunn

Disclosures: This game is developed and published by 3 More Years. It is currently available on PC. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher and was reviewed on PC. Approximately 3 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode, and the game was completed. There are no multiplayer modes.

Parents: This game is not rated by the ESRB, but it does include mature themes of death and environmental destruction. However, there are no explicit visual depictions of death in the game.

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes available.

Dear & Hard of Hearing Gamers: This game offers subtitles and text (see examples above.) They cannot be resized. There are no significant auditory cues. This game is fully accessible.

Remappable Controls: The game’s controls involve only a mouse, and there is no remap option of any kind in the menus.