Walkabout Mini Golf's new 8-Bit Lair is chock full of nods to the 1980s with one of Mighty Coconut's strongest narratives presented through theme park story design.
The new paid downloadable course is available now across Quest, PSVR 2, Pico, and Steam – with iOS still to come. The course is the third in the Walkabout Evil Lairs series following Ice Lair and Laser Lair, joining dozens of others as the studio is already planning future releases into 2026.
Walkabout's original developer and Mighty Coconut studio head Lucas Martell offered UploadVR a behind-the-scenes design tour, mentioning inspirations including Die Hard, Tron, and WarGames. The video below works as a commentary track if you keep it playing in the background while moving through the course on any platform.
We've got more than 20 tour videos in our YouTube playlist embedded below charting Walkabout's design journey with the game's designers and partners building out new lands to play in one of the best destinations inside any VR headset.
For those who don't mind spoilers, or have already played the course through, the video below shows the secret lab of the villain of this particular story, Vincent Vector, a brilliant video game designer who experimented in 1980s-era virtual reality technology before moving along to Tron-like conversions of physical objects into digital counterparts. Following this idea to its inevitable conclusion, yes, you'll even enter Vector Reality from Virtual Reality.
The course features a new brick-breaking mechanic as well as an arcade area with playable cabinets made by Walkabout's designers specifically for 8-Bit Lair. Some holes feature shiny floating coins which need to be collected instead of sinking your putt. The course concludes with a surprising new gameplay element that completes the remarkable environmental storytelling arc, cementing it as one of Walkabout's best yet.
On a recent Gamescast episode while fully immersed in the UploadVR Studios on Quest 3, I played 18 holes of mini golf on my iPad with a mouse using Quest HDMI Link. Perhaps on a future episode in VR, I could pull up 8-Bit Lair on my iPad as my second layer of reality and, around hole 12, I'll end up drawn three levels deep into Vector's Vector Reality.
For those looking for the full Walkabout retro experience, there's also a newly created 1983 edition of the game available in Arcade Legend cabinets as well as the Web.
Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated the release timing for 8-Bit Lair on iOS. It is now correct.
