‘Puzzling Places’ + ‘Walkabout Mini Golf’ Celebrate Birthdays With Free Crossover Puzzle

Today we’re wishing a very happy birthday to two September favorites, Puzzling Places and Walkabout Mini Golf. Yes, coincidentally these two cozy crowd-pleasers both released in the same month (albeit a year apart). Must be something in the autumnal air.

To celebrate, we’re bundling Puzzling Places and Walkabout Mini Golf in the Meta Quest Store so you can easily pick up the pair—and from September 19 to 29, you’ll be able to get the bundle for 25% off as part of the Meta Connect Sale.

Better yet, Puzzling Places developer Realities.io collaborated with Mighty Coconut to chop up Walkabout Mini Golf’s iconic (and recently remastered) Cherry Blossom course into puzzle form. You can download the puzzle for free, starting today.

“At Meta Connect 2023, we started talking about how our course maps—in miniature—might make for puzzles that their players and ours could enjoy,” said Mighty Coconut’s David Wyatt. “The idea just sort-of grew from there.”

Making this idea a reality took a lot of work, though. While Realities.io has turned everything from European monasteries to train cars to sushi platters into puzzles, the team’s never done anything quite like this.

“It was ambitious because from a technical perspective, our tools are more suited to working with photogrammetry models rather than traditional CG environments,” said Realities.io’s Azad Balabanian. “We had to develop new workflows and pipelines to be able to make this collaboration happen and we're quite happy with the end result!”

Both teams also called out the amount of trust necessary for this sort of partnership.

“I would say that trust was a key component to making this work, in that we gave [Realities.io] full access to a ton of assets so that they could pull together elements that would really make this satisfying for our players trying it out in Puzzling Places,” said Wyatt.

“Given the source material from Walkabout was full of color, life, incredible mood and ambiance, as well as iconic sound effects, we had a lot to work with!” said Balabanian. “As David said, it was a project based entirely on trust and the team at Mighty Coconut was gracious enough to provide any and all assets from Walkabout for us to experiment with.”

“This free, collaborative DLC is a way for us to celebrate our launch anniversaries on the Meta Quest platform as well as the continued success of independent VR development studios,” Balabanian continued. “It's a celebration of studios creating fun games and experiences that are native to the medium which provide players with opportunities to connect with one another and to learn more about the world and its many cultures.”

So is this the start of an ongoing relationship? Will we see more Walkabout Mini Golf courses in Puzzling Places in the future? Or a Puzzling Places-themed course in Walkabout? No plans yet—though Balabanian did say, “We're certainly not opposed to it!”

You’ll find the Puzzling Places and Walkabout Mini Golf bundle in the Meta Quest Store—and remember, it’s 25% off through September 29 when the Meta Connect Sale ends. Once you own Puzzling Places, you’ll be able to download the Cherry Blossom puzzle for free in-game.