Sinister Schemes & Arctic Antics: ‘Walkabout Mini Golf’ Launches 25th Course: Ice Lair

Slide into Ice Lair to putt through the icy HQ of former scientist mastermind Svetlana Celsius as you attempt to stop her colony of puffin henchmen intent on perfecting their freeze ray technology. That’s right, Mighty Coconut is back with a new course for Walkabout Mini Golf—their 25th, to be exact.

The course plays on a lot of archetypes of icy villains as well as arctic/brutalist architecture. Lead Concept Artist Zach Alexander thought a lot about how an Ice Lair would be stylized in terms of iconography, uniting the puffin lackeys under one sinister mission.

“We tried to approach the iconography with the same intention as the brutalist architecture,” Alexander explains. “Svetlana Celsius ruled their lair with totalitarian style control. So instead of a more commercial advertisement style artwork that we used in Laser Lair, these graphics were made to feel more like propaganda. For example: It made sense that if she ruled with a frozen fist, her sigil would be the same. Similarly, since she’s so committed to the cold, all the computers would run the same internally developed operating system: Celsius OS, the icon of which is full of right angles, thick lines, and sharp points, but still has the language of a snowflake.”

“Celsius and her puffin minions draw up a bunch of plans for using her freezing technology to turn famous sights into frozen monuments to her power,” Alexander continues, “but we also wanted to inject some personality into those plans by including more imaginative and wishful drawings like the travel posters on which they've crudely drawn snow and ice. It's a fun mix of slightly sinister, but also sincerely innocent.”

The second in Walkabout’s Evil Lair series, coming on the heels of Laser Lair, Ice Lair features the standard 18 easy mode and 18 hard mode holes, a themed foxhunt to earn a commemorative putter, themed avatars, and more:

• Four brand-new gameplay mechanics: freeze ray to turn a player’s ball into an ice cube, ice on the green for frozen and unfrozen balls to traverse, the ability to jump frozen balls over obstacles and barriers, and heat pads over which frozen balls can be melted!
• For the first time, there are additional surfaces the frozen ball can stay “in play” on for added trick shots and tricky work-arounds to evil obstacles.
• Dozens upon dozens of adorably menacing worker puffins that interact with players and follow them around.
• Tons of technical tricks to emulate frozen air, icy water, and the sea life that surround the arctic compound.
• A rideable orca whale!

“For the hard mode, we decided to create a humorous scene of rebellion,” notes Alexander. “The puffin minions have decided that it’s their turn to make the decisions and put their great leader on ice. They’ve grown tired of the cold, so they tear down the frozen fist sigil to replace it with one that reflects their new leadership and start placing space heaters throughout the course. Their new sigil was fun to design because it needed to reflect the power of their puffin revolution, but it’s adorably juxtaposed with the silliness of the adorable puffin identity. But it’s hard to be too adorable with big red glowing eyes, so we threw one onto the sigil to show that despite their appearance, they mean business.”

Do you have what it takes to putt past the penguins and put their evil plan on ice? Find out with the launch of Ice Lair in Walkabout Mini Golf today.