Monster Mini Golf - Norwood, MA
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Score: 46/100
Would we play this course again? No.
Should you play this course? No.
The Takeaway: Well-constructed glow-in-the-dark props aren’t enough to save this indoor course from the topographically-bereft, billiard-like, disorienting mini golf it serves up. The horrors of neon monsters (and a camel) pale in comparison to the existential crisis this course may induce in any player older than middle school age. For better Greater Boston area mini golf we’d recommend heading to McGolf or Hago Harrington’s.
The entrance leading to the 1st hole of Monster Mini Golf in Norwood
TECHNICAL REVIEW
Monster Mini Golf is an 18-hole indoor mini golf course located in Norwood on Route 1, amid glorious acres of car dealerships and fast food palaces, in a warehouse-like building set back from the highway. The course is paired with an arcade area at the front featuring skee-ball, air hockey, and other games. It should be noted that Monster Mini Golf is part of a franchise with locations up and down the east coast, the nearest of which is in Seekonk, Massachusetts.
Exterior entrance featuring a nice gargoyle-adorned castle facade
This course offers what can best be described as “party-style" mini-golf, played in a very dark room with brightly-colored, glow-in-the-dark props on each hole while being serenaded by thumping music (featuring a mix of Top 40, classic rock, and yes, even a personalized DJ/staff shout-out to these two reviewers).
The course itself is almost completely flat, laid out on a giant rug with each hole carved out in a tessellated, tetris-like fashion. You putt the ball on a very dark purple “fairway” rug that is more in-line with interior carpeting than traditional mini-golf artificial turf, with a separate lighter-colored, deep-pile carpet used in sections (see picture below) as the “rough.” Holes are lined on both sides with a neon curbstone-type border, with no dividers after the hole signifying the end of that hole and the beginning of the next. A distinctly bordered and numbered tee box is used on each hole as the starting area.
Monster mini golf makes (unsurprising) use of assorted monster obstacles and decorations (e.g. a gargoyle), strange beasts (a horse skeleton), haunted-looking structures (a scary tree) and more (an outhouse- nothing more terrifying than a rustic shitter at 2 a.m.) entertain the player, striking an almost nostalgic-but-not-quite chord that feels like a prescient audition for a brief cameo in a Stranger Things episode. While some are a bit inexplicable (a neon camel), they are mostly somewhat-entertaining and well-constructed. Of particular note is a giant neon clown face on the 18th hole (whether this should count as a hole or a mere ball return hole is another question), and one hole featuring a glowing barrel of radioactive waste. Both of these are uniquely terrifying. The course leans heavily on the use of partially exposed coffin obstacles, which seem to dot nearly every hole. While it cannot be denied that death stalks us all, the repetition here feels heavy handed and moderately uninspired.
Our candid assessment is that while this style of mini golf play might be well-suited for younger kids attending a birthday party or bored middle-schoolers trying to soak up a few weekend hours on a snowy February day while flirting awkwardly with first girlfriends and roughhousing with classmates (one can imagine just how many times the aforementioned neon camel has been poked in the rear with a golf club while some smartass comment was made and classmate teased—middle school is cruel after all), ultimately this is not a great mini golf course at all. It makes heavy use of claustrophobic and borderline-tedious billiard-style angle and banking play with a Frankenstein infusion, is topographically uninteresting with almost no slopes or elevation changes, and uses a style of carpeting that is dissatisfying. The placement of some obstacles is not well thought out in that they do not factor into hole strategy decisions and simply exist to be putted past, neither banked-off nor putted-through or under. Add in the house music and the low-light conditions, and the player is left with a very odd and disorientating round of mini golf that is not much fun.
Of note is the 3rd hole which features one of the only elevation changes on the entire course, giving the player a choice between a shot right at the hole or a shot up an incline into another “game-of-chance” type hole which then funnels the ball into one of two pipes that spit the ball out either towards or away from the primary hole. Also of note is the 18th hole, which it can be contended should not actually count as a hole (thereby making Monster Mini Golf a 17-hole course). It features a giant clown with an open mouth and long tongue that the player puts up. While a terrific and photo-worthy prop, the putt is very unchallenging and the player does not receive the ball back. This hole is more in line with a 19th/“bonus” hole seen at some courses in that it primarily serves as a convenient way to return the ball to the staff. While there are no rewards for landing an easy hole-in-one on this hole, it should be noted that upon leaving a staff member did give one member of our party a card for a free-round of play after learning of he was the loser (“non-winner” in the parlance of our times) of the round. While a thoughtful gesture, this card will not be getting used.
APPENDIX
The true horror of Monster Mini Golf lurks not among the somewhat haphazard albeit festively-painted glow in the dark monsters and exposed coffins that dot most holes, but in the existential questions that it posed to this player.
Perhaps it was the use of interior house-style carpeting instead of traditional mini-golf greens, or the odd entirely contiguous course layout with no formal breaks between a hole and the next tee box that in theory would allow a player to putt their way through the whole course without ever having to pickup their ball. Or perhaps it was the anonymity-laced audacity of this place in general, a glow-in-the-dark indoor miniature golf course situated in a non-descript box-like building on the fast and busy Route 1 in Norwood, Massachusetts, directly adjacent to an adult gift store (i.e. dildos, etc.) and approximately across the street from a Home Depot.
Or maybe it was due to the time of day: the incongruous feeling of walking out of the warm sun of a June afternoon and into the dark warehouse in which we were the only customers (though it was a Monday at 3pm) felt akin to a reverse birth. Out of the loving light, full of oxygen and into a dark womb-like structure with no sense of time or self, only able to amniotically float along from hole to hole listening to the rhythmic pulse of an upbeat eclectic music mix ranging from Green Day to David Bowie to reggaeton to some pop-house music, with everything punctuated by the oddly parental howl of pre-recorded audio of various unseen monsters saying things to the player like “Who dares go there?”
And so it was that everything felt off. Deeply off.
In the dim light of this course, where it is hard to make out even the putterhead against the dark carpet, one is left to putt their way along and on a subconscious level turn over every decision in their life that brought them to this position. Perhaps even one or two better decisions at any point in the preceding ten years may have avoided and nullified the possibility of ever finding yourself at this Monster Mini Golf on a random Monday afternoon as a 30-something year old man with no kids, chasing some harebrained idea that playing every mini golf course in Massachusetts would be terrific and wholly necessary. If you could pivot your life on the fulcrum of any single previous decision you may very well not care where you pivoted if only you made sure to not pivot towards Monster Mini Golf.
Perhaps things could have been patched up with that ex-girlfriend, or you could have gone back to grad school, or you could even have decided to take the job with that company in Raleigh. Only you didn’t, and now you’re left frustratingly trying to bank shots off glow in the dark curbstones that line every hole on this carpeted course, knowing that something is very wrong with this place, and that if you don’t extract yourself from this situation within the hour you may very well never recover any sense of self, instead doomed to roam Route 1 kicking at rocks and eating discarded Mozzarella sticks from the dumpster at the nearby Applebee’s.
For this author, this was a round of mini-golf that needed to be reflected on, grappled with, confronted, and turned over and over, as one would with an immense yet inexplicably vague and encompassing deep grief that won’t soon be forgotten.
To play at Monster Mini Golf is to open a door to an experience that gnaws tirelessly at the margins of every day, invading your thoughts upon first waking in the morning, and still chewing at them while you fall asleep each night. And even after a long enough time has passed it still leaves you wondering, hoping that perhaps this whole experience was something imagined and not real. Life would be so much simpler if it all were some sort of fever dream, very lucid, but very imagined and not real— that there is no structure housing a mini golf course located at 1560 Route 1 in Norwood, and there never has been. But no, you still have the completed scorecard and the tiny golf scoring pencil among your possessions, so it had to be real…right?
And so, despite the poor mini golf it offers, Monster Mini Golf in Norwood is wildly successful in a way that even its creators could not have imagined, transcending the game itself and pitting the player against himself in a darkened room over and over and over again long after the 18 holes have ended.