Walkabout Mini Golf goes down the rabbit hole with Alice's Adventures in Wonderland course

Since engaging with my relatively newfound love for Walkabout Mini Golf, I've been intrigued with the prospect of trying out every new course developer Mighty Coconut creates for the game. The courses are deeply elaborate, feeling like entire slices of fantastic worlds that just happen to have minigolf courses laid into them. It is amazing how well Mighty Coconut can convey a sense of time and place with it's stylized graphical approach, and the use of some very deliberate sound cues.

The latest (37th!) course for Walkabout Mini Golf releases today, December 4. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland takes the player on a tour of some of the more notable moments from Lewis Carroll's classic - and sometimes creepy - literary work. 

As players become more deeply familiar with Walkabout Mini Golf's courses, they start to notice that many of the courses have a "hook". For example, the Laser Lair uses various laser traps that can fry your ball if you mistime your shot. Upside Town plays with the player's perspective and gravity to deliver a funhouse effect. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland seizes on the book's shrinking and growing dynamic to deliver a unique and sometimes puzzling experience. 

I've had a chance to play through all 36 holes in the new course (18 easy holes and 18 hard), and I'm pleased to report that Mighty Coconut's trademark creativity is on full display here. Players will quickly recognize the characters from the book and the settings, but the golf dynamics at play are a bit more elusive until you figure out what is going on. How, for example, do you handle a situation when your ball is far to large to fit into the tiny hole?

I don't want to spoil any of the puzzles, but I will say that I recommend playing through the course the first few times just for fun, not worrying about your score until you get a handle on how to best navigate the sometimes surprising effects at play. If you find yourself wondering how the heck you are going to manage a certain shot, take a step back and reexamine the possibilities. As usual, there is likely a solution that will present itself if you mess around a little bit. 

In addition to the new course, Walkabout Mini Golf is also receiving an overall update, adding a friends list that will make it easier to connect with your buddies in-game. New course filters are also available, which will help players that don't want to continuously scroll through the entire list to get to what they are looking for - 37 courses are becoming a bit unwieldy to get through, I suppose. All of this in addition to the other recent additions and changes (you can now play Chess in-game, which Mighty Coconut seems to have added just for the fun of it). 

It's great fun to continue exploring the way Mighty Coconut fills these courses with creativity and life. I love the mini golf, but I also have a great time just exploring the worlds, poking at the corners to see what I can find. I can't want to jump into this course with the Gaming Nexus gang to watch them gasp with surprise the same way I did at certain points. We all know Alice's story, but Wonderland still has a few tricks up its sleeve.