What the Golf? (PC)
Like any sport, golf has plenty of rules and guidelines to keep in mind while you’re playing. However, if you strip those away and boil the sport down to the barest of bare essentials, all golf is is a sport about getting an object to a specific destination. This extremely liberal definition of the sport is what What the Golf? builds its experience around, since in this more lenient version of golf, you’ll end up trying to get golf balls, soccer balls, people, houses, spit, planets, and more to a flag or flag equivalent.
What the Golf? isn’t just one type of gameplay being iterated upon. Instead, it is a creative grab bag of concepts that slowly twists golf into something more and more unrecognizable. Your first hole is simple enough, being actual golf and all, but soon you’re hurling a ball made of golf clubs, trying to safely get an urn to a hole, driving a car to the flag, having a horse run across a train, and so many more imaginative twists on the basic concept of getting one object to another area. Pretty much the only consistent thing across these levels is your controls. Clicking with the mouse will make an arrow appear, the motion of your mouse determining the angle of your shot and its power. Admittedly there are also levels where you enter a first person view and might as well be firing a gun, but most of the time the controls do tie to this arrow meter, even if sometimes that arrow goes beyond being just a visual indicator and gets involved in the action in some way itself.
During the adventure mode, the player will hit a golf ball around a research facility where people were experimenting on new ways to spice up golf. Not only does the game repeatedly declare that regular golf is boring, but the game is marketed as a game for people who hate golf by people who don’t know much about golf. As you move through the facility you’ll have repeated run-ins with an AI who has their own batch of challenges that involve bouncing a ball around their screen with different obstacles and gimmicks, and the levels around the facility tend to be grouped into themed areas if they explore similar settings or concepts. For example, the beach levels where you might be using your golf controls to play volleyball or have a crab climb up a rock are near each other, and the game has a few portions where it imitates the mechanics of concepts from other games. Superhot’s mechanic of the world only moving when you move appears in levels that copy that game’s red and white aesthetic, the player spends a bit imitating phone games by getting golf ball birds through Flappy Bird obstacles or knocking structures down with their ball like in Angry Birds, and platforming levels where you hit a golf ball man around to make him jump aren’t shy to copy objects from Mario games.
What the Golf? will take you through plenty of different sports, silly scenarios, and absurd situations, and it’s always interesting to head to the next hole and see what crazy idea the developers have come up with next. To progress the main adventure you do need to complete every normal hole at least once, and this can make some of the less interesting ideas like the pogo stick level bothersome as you grapple with a half-baked mechanic. In fact, sometimes the fact the game is constantly shifting play styles so drastically comes back to bite the game, as you can see glitches or inconsistent physics crop up and hurt the fun. A race against a sheep is harmed by the sheep’s movement being all over the place, and in one level where you’re meant to bait cars so they don’t hit the explosive barrel you’re rolling, a car can start driving around in the air as its behavior starts defying the strange but otherwise consistent logic of the game. It can also be unclear when the game will count you hitting the hillside of a drop as being out of bounds or a way to get onto the next part of the green, but these little issues mostly just impact a hole or two out of an incredible amount of hilarious and enjoyable level concepts.
Even when a regular level might not be the most exhilarating concept though, What the Golf? found a pretty good compromise in regards to how important it is to game completion. The first time you visit a level you rarely have any limitations imposed on you. If you need to get and object to the flag, you are free to hit it as many times as it takes to get there. If you lose by falling off the cliff or breaking a more fragile object, then you just get put back at the beginning of the hole, and most stages are rather small and quick or sorted into multiple portions where each new one is a checkpoint. After you’ve done this first hole you can move onto the next level, but every level also has two extra modes. While beating the regular level is just a matter of trying until you win no matter how difficult it might actually be, the extra modes add new limitations that make What the Golf? actually quite difficult at parts. Usually the first extra mode is something like adding a par to the hole so you have to get the item of choice to its destination in only a certain amount of swings, but this might also instead impose a time limit or ask a different kind of task from you such as knocking over cats or avoiding objects in the level. The third extra mode is usually some new twist on the level’s basic idea, but not every level follows this formula, meaning that some stages instead have three fairly unique new gimmicks explored. Doing these extra challenges is fun for the sake of something more difficult to go up against, but the fact they keep adding to the kooky ideas What the Golf? is based around means some would be a major shame to miss if you’re only trying to rush forward through the facility.
The main campaign is an adventure full of laughs and surprises with plenty of fun ideas for its miniature levels, and the art direction certainly sells the silliness as bodies flop around the place like rag dolls and the game happily throws objects around to make a wonderful mess. The soundtrack is mostly a cappella singing though, and while this has some catchy songs and the ridiculousness can be amped up by having people sing along to the absurdity on screen, the repeated tracks can start to grate if you’re in an area type for too long. The areas aren’t too long because the levels themselves are rather small and snappy though, and even when you do finish the main game, there is still quite a bit left to play. A smaller adventure based around Olympic sports was added that somehow twists golf into previously unexplored sports like pole vaulting, hurdle jumping, and charging around the track as a sword-wielding turtle, and these levels all come with their three modes of play as well. If you want to compete with others there is a multiplayer mode with unique holes, there are daily challenges with online leaderboards, and it is possible there will be a course designer down the road, although it couldn’t hope to match the rampant creativity and variety of mechanics featured in the game’s holes already unless the system turns out surprisingly robust.
THE VERDICT: What the Golf? takes the fundamentals of golf and twists them into increasingly insane and imaginative new forms. Each new level is an opportunity to be delighted by some new silly minigame, and while some stages have weaker ideas and most of the difficulty is found in the optional challenges, the rampant creativity on show drives the player to keep playing just to see what kooky new idea crops up next. This tour through a constant stream of new level ideas is full of too many highlights to list, the mechanical variety and humorous tone making for a fun casual sports game perfect for a player who doesn’t even like sports.
And so, I give What the Golf? for PC…
A GREAT verdict. When you are throwing a ton of wild and deliberately absurd ideas at a wall to see what sticks, you certainly put yourself at risk of only having a bunch of shallow concepts that don’t really pull their weight. What the Golf?, surprisingly, manages to avoid this fate even as it pushes its systems harder and harder into weirder concepts. It doesn’t always hit home when its physics are either too loose or a little unwieldy, but so many more times it delivers on a fun little level to quickly complete and move onto the next idea being showcased. Ones with more depth appear across more levels and the challenges really begin to add stronger twists and harder completion requirements to ensure that the adventure isn’t a cakewalk, and the extra modes allow for some longevity outside of a campaign already packed with little amusements to chuckle at. The extra Olympics mode is actually a rather good showcase of how the game can grow into something even better, most levels containing both the ease of completion in their first hole but still including multiple steps where the iterations become more difficult and complex in a way previously reserved for the challenges.
Trimming or refining weaker holes like the pogo level would bump up the overall quality, but What the Golf? is definitely a pursuit of the strangest ways the simple idea of hitting one thing to a specified destination can manifest. If What the Golf? wanted to shoot for an even higher level of quality, it might just need to dump in even more content and make sure it’s all polished enough to amuse during a player’s brief time visiting that level. With all the imaginative ideas currently explored though, it’s still a blast to go on this wildly creative tour of all the things golf technically could be if you stretch the word’s definition as far as it will go.