Meow Golf

Many, many smug obituaries have been written about virtual reality, or VR, over the technology’s failure to achieve anything remotely close to Mark Zuckerberg’s stupidly titled “metaverse,” a parallel digital dimension of mixed reality that serves as both a workplace and a playspace for about a billion people. But I’m convinced most of those hot-takers and shit-posters simply haven’t spent enough time playing the 2020 VR game Walkabout Mini Golf.

And they sure as hell haven’t tried the new mini-golf course designed in collaboration with Meow Wolf.

Listen. Zuck’s vision is not only out of touch with modern society, it also misunderstands the teeny-tiny contingent of people who are actually regular VR users. I’m one, for sure. But, that doesn’t alter the truth that VR is now the only place you can experience certain masterpieces of art and culture.

Non-VR users might not know that, in the mid-2010s, headsets suddenly got really, really good. The HTC Vive, Oculus Rift and Playstation VR fulfilled overdue promises made by science fiction in the 1990s. You could pop on a headset and participate in a Lethal Weapon-style, high-speed motorway gun-battle against Russian mafia bikers. You could paint in four dimensions with light. You could stomp around Tokyo like a kaiju—and not an artist’s rendering of Tokyo, but a street-by-street reconstruction built from Google Earth data.

We’re seven years past that. Or at least I am. I have memories of virtual spaces that are as vivid as any physical office, coffee shop or dorm room from my IRL history. When I’m “outside” in VR, I sometimes feel the sun on my skin, even when I’m actually in my living room at midnight. It’s also, ironically, one of the only places where I’m not distracted by my phone. So, when I heard Meow Wolf had a mini-golf level coming out for Walkabout Mini Golf, my big question was mainly how it would compare to the immersive arts company’s Santa Fe flagship project, House of Eternal Return?

VR developer Mighty Coconut released Walkabout Mini Golf in 2020 and seems like it hit a successful formula. For $14.99, players get the base game and a few stock courses then, every month or two, the option to buy a new level...I say “level,” but what we’re really talking about are thoughtfully articulated mini-worlds: a pirate island, the lost city of Shangri-La, the decks of Captain Nemo’s Nautilus, a Bond villain’s secret laser-laden lair. I find my inner peace replaying the Frank Lloyd Wright-inspired “Arizona Modern” level (imagine the Santa Fe Opera as 18 holes on a red-rock mountainside).

Then, in 2022, Mighty Coconut started partnering with external creative companies, and suddenly we were gifted with courses set in the worlds of gaming landmark Myst or cinema’s Labyrinth (and yes, the latter is as awesome as you hope it is). Yet, no matter how fantastic, all the downloadable content (or DLC) shares a common adherence to realistic golf physics. Each course is unmistakably mini golf—except for the latest collaboration from December. It is unmistakably Meow Wolf.

From the first hole, Meow Wolf changes the laws of nature to suit its own new biome, Numina: a cavern system where neon flowers bloom from the walls and delightfully improbable creatures thrive on the banks (and underbanks) of a mirror-world lilypond. According to Mighty Coconut’s original announcement, there are at least 57 species of plants and 33 animated creatures, and that doesn’t even count the life your ball takes on. It might suddenly grow to the size of a Raiders of the Lost Ark boulder or shrink down to a marble. If your ball hits a glowing orb, it splits into a half-dozen multiversal permutations, which then reunite into whichever ball is closest to the hole.

Just as in Meow Wolf’s physical world experiences, there are portals to other dimensions, such as an idyllic pasture where you use your ball to corral a flock of skittish golf holes that “baaaaah!” like sheep. Or a Tron-esque world, where your ball goes flat and behaves like an air hockey puck. Some of the elements might seem a little less novel to experienced VR players who’ve burned through Squanch Games’ Accounting and Trover Saves the Universe, but, nevertheless, my partner heard me yell “Oh shit!” several times throughout our first play-through.

Thankfully, like all Walkabout DLC, “Meow Wolf” is designed to be replayable. There’s an easy level, there’s a hard level, plus all new holes and environmental elements. You can play alone, with friends or with randomly assigned strangers online, and there are 18 “lost balls” to find in the environment, each its own playable art object; plus a treasure hunt that nets users an in-game Meow Wolf golf club should they complete the task. I wish I could tell you what that looks like, but I’m currently stuck on the fourth clue.

It’s a bit ironic, in a recreational sense: in 2016, Meow Wolf turned a disused Santa Fe bowling alley into a fantasy world, and now they’ve transformed their fantasies into a mini-golf course. House of Eternal Return is magical because a group of artists built a space that felt infinite, otherworldly and unconstrained in what is actually very finite square footage, wrought with worldly manufacturing materials and subject to the constraints of building codes. This time, Meow Wolf started with the boundless possibilities of VR and the loose rules of a family sport and built a pocket universe (or a universe of pockets) that feels alive.