A Little Golf Journey (Switch)

The phrase “golf journey” can conjure images of golfing your way across the land in some massive adventure, but while the “little” in A Little Golf Journey’s title already works to keep such expectations in check, it’s not quite a tiny game either. This level-based campaign takes place across eight worlds and over 100 unique golf courses, but with each one being fairly tiny in scope, you’ll also soon realize that this golf game is deeply focused in on precise hits to the point that puzzling out the intended path to each hole is the true purpose of this journey.

Underscored by a relaxing soundtrack with plenty of lovely piano music, A Little Golf Journey does try to give your play a little direction with the story of two characters known only as X and Y who write little letters as they work towards reconnecting as you golf your way across a few locations. In fact, they perhaps write too many letters while having very little to say, and while some are just cheeky jokes or little poems that acknowledge when you find a hidden secret, even on the main path through the stages you don’t get to learn much about the pair nor do they feel like they’re saying too much to get you invested in just the broad vibes of a relationship strained by distance. Its weak presence means it is pretty easy to focus on the golfing though and you do at least head to a range of locations during your work to reunite the pair, the game moving from simpler golf courses to Japanese gardens, snowy climes, and Egyptian sands.

When you start a level in A Little Golf Journey, you’ll often find the course isn’t too large, it almost always able to fit on screen without zooming out too far. It would be easy to reach the hole in two or three hits if not for the obstructions and rough patches that make these levels stand out from each other, making your way to the hole more about identifying the right landing spots as you chip up and over whatever is blocking the way. Golfing itself is pretty simple, you have no clubs to worry about and there’s a set distance where you can hit a ball with pretty much pinpoint accuracy, but to better handle tougher levels you will have to hold down ZR to add extra power to your shot, the harder swing having a set distance so that farther shots have less coverage. A guiding line shows you the path the ball will travel until it first lands or hits something, but there’s an interesting quirk to the line that becomes more and more important the deeper into the adventure you get. Unless you hold ZL to steady your aim, the line will waver a little, this not too pronounced during a regular shot but a power swing this movement becomes more pronounced and actually vital to clearing future levels with less strokes.  The power shot’s line will quickly move around in almost a figure eight pattern when you aren’t focused, meaning some precise timing can be the difference between sinking a shot perfectly or sending it bouncing off and away to the point you might as well reset the level.

Resetting a level is probably going to be a pretty common occurrence in A Little Golf Journey due to the fact its holes are constructed to be almost like puzzles. As you progress further, the amount of safe ground to land your ball on becomes more and more limited, and while there will be rough areas you can land your ball in, these limit how far you can hit the ball and might as well be death sentences if you’re trying to clear levels with a decent performance. In A Little Golf Journey, there is technically nothing stopping you from hitting the ball as many times as you need to get to the hole, but a scoring system similar to par does become important to unlocking new levels as gates exist where you need a certain amount of stars to continue. Levels can reward you with up to three or four stars based on how many shots it took you to reach the hole, and depending on the level layout, the standards can shift around quite a bit. Many expect you to reach the hole in two or three swings, but in later and more complicated levels like the ones on the moon, you might be able to earn four stars even after four swings. Since you do have such strong control over your ball’s trajectory though, the game does expect a good deal of understanding on how your ball will bounce after it lands and where exactly you should be aiming. For many stages, you can only earn the maximum amount of stars if you suss out the exact way it wants you to golf, and that’s where it can start to feel a bit like you’re solving puzzles rather than playing a sport. This type of challenge does pair well with the tiny levels though, and while the camera isn’t always cooperative, the consistency of how the ball behaves means you can sometimes even aim without a great view of where you’re pointing just because you’ll inevitably build up a strong understanding trying to earn top marks.

Getting two stars in every level is often a safe bet to be able to make consistent progress although you’ll definitely want to invest in searching out secrets, not only because they provide more levels to earn stars in, but sometimes they will provide paths to free stars or secret levels that can trigger the appearance of Blue Things. Beyond the normal goal of trying to get to the course’s hole, many levels will contain hidden activities once you’ve found something out of place. It can be a wiggling piece of scenery or a barely visible translucent square, but depending on the world you can end up doing extra challenges to unlock the path to additional courses. Some of these involve needing to hit the ball in exact paths to collect orbs under a time limit, others like the putting challenges in the ice world involve ricocheting things well, and some are just as simple as noticing a strange hole you could golf into that isn’t the main one. These can be hard to spot but the world map contains some clues to let you know one is nearby, each level you beat triggering a lovely animation of part of the area getting colored in which can show you another path branches off from the level you cleared.

The same ideas are reused a little too often for these bonuses and the Blue Things that appear as collectibles in courses after you clear secret levels are sometimes incredibly easy to grab or obnoxiously positioned to the point they’re not really worth the trouble. You do need a set amount of Blue Things to see the game’s true ending and reach the game’s trial caves, the trials perhaps closer to the original concept of a “golf journey” I described at the start. The rare trial caves have no set stroke limit and are purely about crossing large continuous courses where you need to figure out special gimmicks and exact landing spots. Removing any requirements beyond clearing it makes trying again and again easy, which is important as it is one of the few areas where you really do need to engage with some interesting mechanics. Needing to time when you enter holes to launch out of others to land properly or activating moving fields of energy that reveal new ground or erase barriers actually makes the golfing quite challenging without any need for star rankings, and while these are strong in design and well conceived, there’s remarkably few of them despite the game pouring most of its unique ideas into them.

While you travel to many areas that look different in the main levels of A Little Golf Journey, it can often feel like the areas mostly set themselves apart in theming rather than content. Sure, the desert uses pyramids to block a potential shot, but it’s not much different from a wall, and while there’s slippery ice in the snow levels, you don’t really need to engage with it outside of putting challenges. Most of the time, no matter where it might seem you are, you’re trying to stay on the safe turf while avoiding rough patches, water hazards, and smacking into whatever type of tree is appropriate for the region. This doesn’t mean every level feels absolutely the same, but areas like the castle gardens really struggle to stand out save when they have really winding or abnormal layouts. When the main adventure does pull out a gimmick that really impacts the golfing though, it’s often something like increased wind or reduced gravity, something that mucks with the built up understanding of your ball’s flight path but it just requires a slight adjustment to expectations for that world rather than really thinking about the courses differently. Rare ideas like moving platforms where timing your shot right is important do crop up, but generally A Little Golf Journey does feel like it doesn’t stray much from the formula you find it using in world 1, making it harder to get invested in it for long sittings.

THE VERDICT: A Little Golf Journey provides quite a lot of small but smartly designed courses where the challenge is trying to identify the right path to the hole, the star system and plethora of secrets giving reason to really consider the layouts and time your swings just right. At the same time though, this concept isn’t really put through its paces enough, many new areas failing to bring new ideas outside of a different look and a slight shake-up to how the minigame secrets are handled. It is still mellow and provides a solid challenge if played in small bursts, but A Little Golf Journey tries to make a large adventure out of a few ideas and while individual ideas are sound, they settle into similar puzzle ideas that leads to it wearing a bit thin.

And so, I give A Little Golf Journey for Nintendo Switch…

An OKAY rating. While more substantial than something like Pocket Mini Golf, A Little Golf Journey’s early promise wanes as it bases itself too strongly around trying to spot the perfect path to a hole but not finding novel ways to test the player’s ability to do so. You will continuously get new layouts so it’s not like it every truly runs out of ideas, but the terrain shuffling can range from distinct layouts to designs that will be forgotten almost immediately after you clear them. The star system does encourage a keener eye for how you approach levels and hiding secrets about gives another layer to the journey so even small easy levels can have greater importance, and having secrets unlocked with little minigames does add a brief bit of variety the game could have better used as part of the core play. The trial caves really show where A Little Golf Journey could have gone with its ideas as they still do use the idea of hitting to the right areas precisely but concoct novel complications that truly test your problem solving skills. They were likely put behind Blue Thing gates to keep the core adventure focused on more calm low key levels where you can take as much time as you like lining up your shots and not having to worry about complicated gimmicks, but that core campaign almost feels a bit too afraid to leave that comfort zone and when it does it will be for unexciting ideas like the strong wind stages.

If you only pick up A Little Golf Journey for a few courses every now and again it will likely be a much easier experience to appreciate, its lovely music and visuals making a quick bit of golfing appealing even if it isn’t exceptional. Less a journey in that situation and more a time waster, A Little Golf Journey could have funnily enough benefited from being littler, a more effective package that condensed its ideas into a set of strong golf puzzles instead of carving out pieces to make secret and side content. Its limited ambition aside, A Little Golf Journey is still effective at providing a set of condensed golfing puzzles, so if you keep your expectations in check, it does tinker within its idea space well enough that it never drops below decent.