Mini Mini Golf Golf Golf, recently released on Steam, at first glance looks like a simple, albeit not the most successful mini-golf simulator. The controls are slightly annoying, the physics sometimes behave strangely, and the number of available holes is hardly impressive. But all this is just a screen behind which one of the most unusual games of recent years is hidden.
This game is the debut project of the arthouse indie studio Three More Years from Berlin. The action takes place in 2063 on a retro-futuristic space station hovering over a post-apocalyptic Earth. The player needs to not only drive a ball around the playing field, but also solve the mystery of what led the planet to ecological collapse. In the process, you will encounter a mysterious extraterrestrial intelligence that communicates with you through glitches and distortions of the game.
The first few minutes of Mini Mini Golf Golf are immediately captivating. The camera jumps between different angles, text will appear on the screen, then on the ground, visual effects resemble old VHS tapes, and the entire interface seems to resist your interaction. All this turns the game into a real arthouse adventure, where mini-golf is just a tool for the narrative.
But the game touches not only on global topics like climate change and its social consequences. It also talks about personal things: about love, memory and burnout. The developers even included their own podcast, Mini Mini Talk Talk, in the game, which not only discusses the philosophy of video games, but also hides clues to advance the plot.