Quixote Valley: How Walkabout’s Windmill Course Delivers Ghibli-Inspired Serenity
Windmills turn slowly in the night as the breeze of an incoming storm rattles strings of hanging lights.
Quixote Valley in Walkabout is a mini golf course that plays through a community shaped by the wind. Perhaps pirates were shipwrecked and set up a serene little homestead in the breezy sea-side cliffs, Mighty Coconut studio head Lucas Martell explained. Walkabout’s creator and original course designer recently walked through Quixote Valley, with its wind-blown design and Studio Ghibli-like calming atmosphere, and highlighted the work of Mighty Coconut’s team of artists who continue to hone their eye-catching approach to environmental storytelling and art optimization for VR. Lightning reflects off the waters nearby and the entire countryside is dotted with flowers, a “painterly” approach as Martell put it, making use of less than half a dozen triangles to form each basic shape.
“I’ve always hated the windmill holes, and I always just felt like it’s oh, just every course that I’d played, they had the windmill,” Martell said. “I decided, okay, if we’re gonna do windmills, let’s do a windmill course that actually is…the best windmill usage in Minigolf that has ever been done.”
The end result is that “I just want to live here” as Martell conveyed the overall execution.
The 23-minute video embedded below showcases our latest walkthrough of the game from Mighty Coconut. We’ve been touring the game’s courses with the game’s creators and Quixote Valley’s 23-minute walkthrough is one of the longest we’ve recorded. The tour showcases the harder night version of the course that’s accessible if you score below par on it during the day, and features Martell guiding us across the course’s 18 holes. Martell explains some of the tiny details players might have overlooked that create such a strong sense of place, from bunching up flower petals subtly implying wind effects on gameplay to windmills which, rather than blocking balls, instead save them from flying off a cliff.
If you’re interested in diving even deeper into the design of one of VR’s best games we’ve got a full course tour playlist embedded below starting with the game’s first-ever course and continuing to the game’s most recent paid expansions, including Atlantis, Labyrinth, and 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea.
