“Mulligan!” shouts Andy Santos, game director of House of Golf 2 at Starlight Games. We’ve implemented a couple of our own rules into the mini golf course at Golf Fang Liverpool, a neon-lit, desperately edgy establishment that serves (shock horror) beer and has holes set in (gasp) the red light district and rancid toilets.

The mulligan rule isn’t really our own though, or at least not my own. The ability to retake a fluffed shot has been pulled straight from House of Golf 2, which grants you a generous nine mulligans per nine-hole championship. We’ve opted for nine mulligans for this 18-hole course, and Santos is embarking on his usual strategy of using them up early. I plan to save mine.

Santos, along with design director Nick Burcombe who joined us for mini golf and Starlight CEO Gary Nichols who stayed at the office (presumably because he didn’t want to be embarrassed by our superior swings), led me through two hours of the game earlier that day. The Starlight office is a five-minute walk from this mini golf course, in Liverpool’s Baltic Triangle, an area which teeters on the edge of being cool and being completely gentrified. As well as being a Mecca for Liverpool’s students and stag dos, the dockside warehouses are secretly the hub of the city’s game development scene.

In one such warehouse, Santos is trying to show off his trickshots. Burcombe offers occasional advice – “a little harder”, “aim for the yellow stripe”, “aim for the hole” – and Nichols mostly laughs. My initial impression of House of Golf 2 is that it looks gorgeous, and my second impression is that it’s the perfect family game. Despite having never met the developers before, the shared experience of laughing off bad misses or oohing and ahhing at close calls immediately brings us together and makes us comfortable with one another. It reminds me of Christmases spent around the Wii with three generations of family taking part in bowling and tennis.

This is a game meant for multiplayer – whether competing in the same room as your friends or aiming for the next person ahead of you on the leaderboard. As such, it does away with a lot of what golf games so often focus on. The power of your shot, for instance, isn’t some timing-based minigame. You can tweak it to the perfect amount in order to land the ball precisely where you want – and the shadow of your last shot sticks around for your next, in case you roll out of bounds and need to tweak it.

It’s these touches that make the game so moreish. For every satisfying birdie or perfectly-pinged trickshot that careers off the ketchup, rolls across a pancake, and plops precisely onto the green, there’s two that go wrong. Whether you use your mulligan or take the bogey, you want to try again. That red number on your scorecard is a blot you feel compelled to remove next time around.

My next impression is that these holes are complex. There are usually two or three immediately obvious routes to the hole, but nearly every time Santos takes a shot, he’s found some shortcut, portal, or secret ramp to halve the number of shots he needs to take. It’s just a shame he needs to use up all of his mulligans in order to make the spectacular eagle.

“Because it’s a physics-based game, there might be routes that Nick or Andrew haven’t designed into the game,” Santos explains. “I’ve done things before where I’m hitting the ball and bouncing off the top of an object to try and get to [the hole], and it gets under your skin a little bit.”

It’s these close-but-no-cigar moments that make you want to try and try again, perfecting each hole before moving on.

Back to the IRL golf. Our mulligans are a little trickier to implement than those in the game, and we have to let a couple of other golfers skip past us as we’re taking a while. Manually working out the approximate location of your ball before you hit it is tricky, but we’re here for fun, not to compete. Or so I thought. A friendly argument breaks out between the two developers over whether or not unused mulligans are taken off your final score. Their bickering only ceases when we’re faced with what can only be described as the most disgusting toilet I’ve ever seen.

You must either chip the ball into the urinal, or take the long way around and head up the ramp into the excrement-filled toilet bowl. Take it from me, this loo makes Trainspotting look like Mrs Hinch’s bathroom. None of us manage to make the chip (we’re using putters, for goodness’ sake), but I get stuck in a corner and need three more shots than the devs to sink my ball. Chances blown, I wonder about the potential for a toilet level in House of Golf 2, which is entirely set within a house.

The kitchen is filled with delicious-looking cakes and brilliantly realised knock-off products (Boom Tarts are a personal favourite) so that it looks like browsing through the aisles of an Aldi. The bedroom is strewn with kids toys, from robots who shove you, to cranes that pick you up and deposit you elsewhere. The living room has slightly more traditional obstacles, like piles of magazines and TV remotes, and the attic and garage are much like my own crawlspace: filled with the boxes of hoarded nonsense and power tools that come out once a year. It gives great character to each hole and course. Being slowed by spilled mayo in the kitchen or using a fallen nail as a makeshift ramp in the garage really sells the ‘House’ portion of the game’s title. But why no bathroom?

“There’s no toilet-” starts Santos, before being interrupted by his boss. “There actually is a toilet. There was a bathroom, but we never ended up using it,” Nichols explains. Burcombe proffers the name, the “Down the Drain Championship” and writes it in his notebook.

Starlight is committed to supporting House of Golf 2 going forwards, so throwaway ideas like the Down the Drain Championship could well become a reality in a few years’ time. The first game was very well-received on the Switch, so Nichols decided to follow it up with PC and console versions, polished and prettied up. Wipeout alum Burcombe came on board, fresh from making Table Top Racing: World Tour – another game where you navigated around a course made of household objects – and the result is the pristine package we’re playing today.

There’s no online multiplayer functionality, but with the online league tables, you don’t really need it. You’re competing against someone’s score on a leaderboard, rather than against their ghost on the course, but that’s enough. As well as single holes that rotate every 48 hours, there’s a fresh, curated Championship each week. So even when you’ve completed all the Championships, collected all the medals, trophies, and balls, there’s still more to keep you playing each week.

That’s not even taking into account that you’ll want to replay holes to find the funniest shortcuts or crack the game out with friends for a laugh and a beer. I also caught a sneak peek at some spooky assets that may or may not be involved in a Halloween event later this year.

Some of Golf Fang’s mini golf holes are eerily similar to those in House of Golf 2. No, not the one with the sex toys. But one hole is set in a bank vault, another is a giant pinball machine with three different routes to the hole. I opt for the centre of the pinball machine, a glory shot labelled “hole in one” with a big arrow. I miss by centimetres, pretty impressive for a course at such an angle and elevation. But it’s still a miss, and I’m hanging onto my mulligans.

Santos follows me, also narrowly missing, but Burcombe pings his ball towards a tiny tunnel that neither of us noticed. He misses too (story of our evening), but it’s clear his time designing House of Golf 2 courses has flicked a switch in his brain so that he looks for alternative routes to the hole.

We all sink our next shots, sharing the spoils with scores of two apiece. This is where mini golf lags behind House of Golf 2, as the only way of scoring is by your number of shots. There are no ties in the video game, because of its unique scoring system that feels ripped straight from a skateboarding game.

That’s because it is ripped straight from a skateboarding game. From Skate, to be exact. That’s Santos’ fault, as the House of Golf 2 game director is one of the co-creators of EA’s iconic skating series.

“We score the amount of movements,” he explains. “Longer shots usually score higher, things like rebounds and different items are scored differently. So if you hit off one of those movement objects, for example, you get more points for that, [and] if you get air time, you get a multiplier on your points there.”

On top of that, your total number of shots has a big effect on your trick score, as Starlight calls it. A birdie is a 2x multiplier, an eagle 4x, and an albatross 8x – I think, I was too busy celebrating to note down the numbers. On the other end of the scale, even a simple bogey – so easily done when you’re out of mulligans – halves your score and sends you freefalling down the leaderboards.

It’s clear to see how this group of veteran developers – supported by a team of all ages – are pooling their wealth of experience to create one of the most enjoyable golf games I’ve ever played. You never feel hard done by due to RNG, you never get too frustrated to continue. You simply want to play and play again. It’s a game that’s immeasurably better with friends, but even swinging solo you can set your eyes on a certain score, position on the leaderboard, or just nailing a trick shot you’ve lined up in your mind’s eye.

The penultimate hole at mini golf is gaming themed. We shoot through a half-pipe, past Definitely Not Mario and Legally Distinct Donkey Kong. The final quarter of the course is a little underwhelming to be perfectly honest, but there’s a competitive edge now as we approach our conclusion. Mulligans are being used more frequently, even by Burcombe, who had been stingy with them up to this point. He was arguing for them being taken off your score, if that wasn’t already clear.

Our different strategies and approaches to IRL mini golf are a perfect parallel to how you can approach each hole in House of Golf 2. We each employed different strategies, two of us were rewarded with holes-in-one for our bravery, but we all reached the hole. Golf Fang doesn’t give you pars for each hole, but I reckon we were all well under. As for the results? Well, I didn’t come last, so I’m happy.

I’m still replaying my missed shots in my mind while lying in bed each night. If only I hadn’t got stuck in that horrible toilet. If only I hadn’t saved that mulligan, which went unused, in the bowling alley. It’s much easier (and cheaper) to replay a hole in House of Golf 2, to correct your errors on another round, but I think I need to head back to the real thing to show these developers who’s boss. Until then, however, I think I’ve found a shortcut around this paint can – damn it. Mulligan!