There are a great many indie golf games out there. Spurred on by the success of Golf Story and oddball titles, indie devs have made a variety of creative takes on golf and minigolf over the last few years. Some of them are simple like Golf Peaks. Others strive for a more complex comedic golf experience.
Cursed to Golf from developer Chunhai Labs and publisher Thunderful is definitely the latter of those choices. In Cursed to Golf, you play a golf pro struck by lightning on the final shot to win a championship. You die, but death is not the end. Not for you, golf pro. Instead you’re trucked off to Golf Purgatory and told that if you play 18 holes successfully, you can earn your way back to life and escape from this golf hell.
Sounds silly, right? It is, but it’s also kind of a hoot. Your goal is to make it to the flag within the number of strokes provided. There’s no way you’ll make it though. It’s just too far and the courses are all over the place. Instead, you’ll have to smash golf trophies with your shots along the way. Gold statues give you four more shots and silver ones give you two. There’s always enough to keep things moving as long as you don’t muck it up with a few bad shots.
The problem is that bad shots are easy to make here. Instead of a normal golf targeting system, there’s a two press setup. Hit A once and you start the power meter. Select your power as it rises and falls by hitting A again. Then your trajectory is shown, but it’s moving up and down fairly quickly and you can’t see all that far. Hit A again when the ball is where you think you want it to go and it pretty much lands exactly there. Depending on power and angle it might bounce pretty far though. Once you’ve lost your first game, you’ll get access to spin, allowing you to control the ball once it’s in the air and landed and do all sorts of trick shots, but it’s still about aiming and firing off the right trajectory first. There’s only so much you can compensate for after all.
Additionally, this is a simplified version of golf. You have one driver, one iron, and a wedge. That’s it. Naturally drivers are for long shots, irons for mid-range, and wedges for those tight hops and sand traps. Get stuck in the rough and it’s no driver for you too. But firing off a long shot doesn’t always help you in Cursed to Golf. Instead you have to decide what driver to use to get over the obstacles, whether they be raised platforms, sand traps, spikes, holes filled with dynamite, or even skeletal hands that will reach out of the ground and grab your ball! There’s a lot more than a normal golf game going on here!
In addition to the weird obstacles, there are also packs of golf trading cards. Buying or earning a pack nets you from 1-5 cards of varying quality. Some might give you an extra stroke or two while others simply let you call a mulligan and take the last shot over. You can even buy cards in the pro shop, along with changing outfits (though they mostly suck).
Golf purgatory doesn’t exactly follow all the rules of physics though and you can do all kinds of fun and goofy things with your golf balls using trading cards. Doubling them, making them do U-turns, turning them into lead weights or drills, and even firing off ones with environmental effects like ice! This zany mix of weird options really adds to the fun of gameplay. If you want to save them, you can toss your cards in an album at the pro shop as well, ensuring that you’ll have some if you fail in your endeavors.
This is where Cursed to Golf gets a little hinky however. Remember, the game is a roguelike as well, so you never get the same courses in the same order. Instead they’re all scrambled and each time you fail, you go back to the beginning and start over with a new random course. Your first set of holes is officiated by a Legendary Golf Pro, a giant Scottish ghost who’s pretty hilarious. At the end of his course, you’ll have to beat him stroke for stroke to proceed to the next area, the desert. This is where they introduce spikes for the first time.
Chances are at some point in the game you’ll hit the wrong button or get outshot by a rival golf pro. If that happens, it’s game over for you. You lose every card in your inventory and it’s back to the start. But say you’ve gotten to the third golf pro. It’s back to the very beginning of the game, not back to the beginning of the course! You’re right back with the Scotsman, slowly creeping through the entire game. Oh look, a new mechanic that you’re not sure how to shoot through. Failed, start again. Oh, that angle was slightly off! Failed, start again. Hit the button at the wrong time, bounced back, and that was my last stroke. Game over. You get where this is going by now…
The point is that Cursed to Golf is supposed to be a roguelike and one of the hallmarks of roguelikes is incremental progression. That’s not really a thing here. Sure you can save up to 40 cards in your book at the pro shop, but it won’t be enough to master some of the later courses and they’re remarkably hard. You’re not getting better clubs. You’re not going back to the beginning of a course but to the start of the game, and repeating the same areas over and over again in a slow, methodical golf game and waiting for other players shots in the final round is tedious. This is no Dead Cells or Rogue Legacy with high-speed interactive action. It’s golf. Golf that repeats interminably with no sign of letting up even after you’ve gotten further than ever before but ran out of additional shots and now it’s back to the start. Again.
The loop in Cursed to Golf is, in a word, cursed. It’s a remarkably fun game that many players will simply give up on due to a single configuration choice by the devs. If you could continue from the new course you’d reached if you lost, Cursed to Golf would be a lot more approachable. But as it is, only die hards that want to grind through up to 18 holes over and over and over again will manage to win their way back to life in this odd little game.
That’s a shame, honestly. Cursed to Golf is really, incredibly fun to play. The challenge is good, the skill level required is high but achievable, and the silly little quirks are a pleasure. But because there’s no real character growth, playing through the entire game over and over loses its appeal and the gameplay goes stale after a while. Add to that the limited variety in later levels and you have a recipe that entices players in with its cleverness and then leaves them flat once they get a real feel for the game.
If you’re a golf fanatic and you like quirky indie games, Cursed to Golf might be the game for you. The visuals are solid, the gameplay is overall well-designed, and even the music is rather catchy. But starting over at the very beginning with no real changes in your abilities is a real drag that will turn off a fair number of players. Temper your expectations and remember that this cutesy golf game conceals a remarkably challenging game that will test both your golf skills and your patience. If you’re still in for a shot, go for it. There’s a great game hiding here behind a few questionable gameplay decisions and hopefully some players really enjoy themselves!
This review is based on a digital copy of Cursed to Golf provided by the publisher. It was played on a Nintendo Switch in both docked and undocked modes and played equally well in both. Cursed to Golf is also available for PS4, Xbox, and PC on Steam.
