Myst island is no longer a solitary experience.
Mighty Coconut, working with Cyan’s blessing, launched its multiplayer mini golf theme park version of the island for virtual reality today. The $2.99 paid add-on course is now available in Walkabout Mini Golf on Quest and Steam.
The original game’s puzzling experience defined the era of CD-ROM games from 1993 onward with its one-scene-at-a-time views into a mysterious island. The game has since been reimagined multiple time with Cyan itself launching Myst in standalone VR and even adding hand tracking. Until now, though, what hasn’t fundamentally changed is the sense of isolation you might feel exploring its environment.
Mighty Coconut’s theme park version of the island is playable with friends. They’ve adapted some of the puzzles into versions that work as mini golf holes with a night mode of the game showing the island in new lighting and more difficult holes. In the video below we toured the new 18 hole course with studio head Lucas Martell as explained the design challenge and highlights the differences to the classic game.
“We didn’t want to turn it into ‘you must mini golf and you must also do a brain teaser at the same time,” Martell told us. “So ultimately we did have to simplify a couple of our ideas.”
Martell teased that they’ve already got a full slate of upcoming courses for Walkabout planned through 2023, and they’ve even begun work on some courses for 2024. The studio already announced upcoming courses inspired by the works of Jules Verne and launched 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea. Martell also revealed during our tour they’ve got another unannounced licensed course slated to release next year.
“Something that Rand [Miller, Cyan co-founder] has said multiple times, is that the very first time that we went in it, the weirdest thing to him wasn’t the fact that it was our version, or even the fact there was mini golf on Myst island, the thing that was most strange to him was that there were other people in there with him,” Martell told us. “And he had even been on Myst island several times in VR but never with anybody else. In some ways that is even the bigger change to Myst island than the fact that we, yeah, added some mini golf holes to it, just being able to experience it with other people.”
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