I take off my golfing cap to the developer for Putt in Parks for coming up with a fantastic mash-up concept. We play as the son of a dad who is serving at war, and our dad has left us a mini-golf game he’d been working on, inspired by their mutual love of the pastime. We are transported into the game, with voicenotes from dad to accompany us, as we wander around his parks, walking from hole to hole in a tranquil world.
Yes, my tagline for this game is “what if Firewatch was a mini-golf game?!”
That premise is where my head was at for the majority of initial playtime. The game contains four parks, each with nine holes that you can, in theory, take on in any order. You’ll have to complete each hole without reaching a foul to complete the park before moving on to the next one. This will all take place from a first-person perspective, and from a park walking sim perspective, that is a lovely design choice. Whilst the walking pace is slow, the bright pastel colours and clean aesthetic are vibrant and calming. The odd butterfly will flutter next to a stream. A distant mountain range may let you wander its foothills, but no further. They aren’t densely packed environments, but they set a calm tone.
Sadly, that first-person camera perspective is less than ideal when it comes to the mini-golf. During the first few holes, you’ll be able to see the entire hole in front of you. As the game progresses, verticality, ramps, and bends are introduced. Suddenly, you can’t see where the ball is headed, and so you’ll be trying to suss out where’s best to hit it. Yes, you can exit golf mode and walk around the hole to get better vantage points, but that vantage point rarely translates into meaningful intel. This is mostly down to two issues. Firstly, the first-person camera lacks a sense of depth, speed, or perception of gradient. You can’t tell from where you are standing if your ball is close to a ledge or flying over it. You’ll have to keep making the same mistakes over and over, narrowing down your window of success. Secondly, that window of success is made difficult to read because the user interface for the mini-golf lacks any meter markings. It’s just a white circle that fills up, and with a very slight lag delay woven in, making replicable, aimed, and powered shots is far trickier than it should be. There’s no indication how powerful a shot will be, so every hole is a voyage of discovery. Early on, that doesn’t matter. As soon as water or ledges come into play and falling off the course results in a restart foul, it detracts a large portion of fun from the overall experience.
If the mini-golf makes the most simple of hole layouts overly complicated for no reason, the story is the opposite. We have a very rigid, gen-AI-like delivery of voiceover notes, counting down the time until your dad returns home. There’s very little backstory or character development beyond arbitrary comments like “be good for your mum” and “try hard at school” type of comments. The opening scene in the game is a spoiler for the endgame of Putt in Parks, and this either undermines the entire story, or sets in a growing sadness upon each voicenote. However, it’s so barebones that I cared very little about the setup at all. As a narrative gamer, that surprised me, so it shows how much of a missed opportunity the story was.
Putt in Parks is a great idea that lacks finesse in its execution. I wasn’t expecting Firewatch, but I was expecting a tranquil, if emotionally-charged, round of mini-golf that would engross me, not frustrate me. I feel like a few more months in the development oven could sort out a few of the issues raised, but as it stands at launch, this is a curiosity rather than any kind of recommendation.
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