There are a myriad of indie golf games out there. Spurred on by the success of Golf Story and eccentric titles, indie developers have created a variety of creative takes on golf and miniature golf in recent years. Some of them are simple, like Golf Peaks. Others aim for a more complex comedic golf experience.
Cursed to Golf from developer Chunhai Labs and publisher Thunderful is certainly the last of those picks. In Cursed to Golf, you play as a golf professional who is struck by lightning on the last shot to win a championship. You die, but death is not the end. Not for you, golf pro. Instead, you will be taken to Golf Purgatory and told that if you successfully play 18 holes, you can come back to life and escape this golf hell.
Sounds crazy, right? It is, but it’s also kind of a hoot. Your goal is to reach the flag within the number of tricks given. However, you won’t succeed. It’s just too far and the jobs are everywhere. Instead, you have to crush golf trophies along the way with your shots. Gold statues give you four more shots and silver ones give you two. There’s always plenty to keep things moving, as long as you don’t mess it up with a few bad shots.
The problem is that you can easily get bad shots here. Instead of a normal waveguide system, there is a two-press setup. Press A once and you’ll start the power meter. Select your power as it rises and falls by hitting A again. Then your trajectory is displayed, but it goes up and down quite quickly and you can’t see that far. Hit A again when the ball is where you think you want it and it lands pretty much exactly there. However, depending on the power and angle, it can bounce quite far. Once you lose your first game you gain access to spin so you can control the ball once it’s in the air and landed and do all sorts of trick shots, but it’s still all about aiming and finishing the right lane first to fire . After all, there is only so much you can compensate.
In addition, this is a simplified version of golf. You have one driver, one iron and a wedge. That is it. Of course drivers are for long strokes, irons for medium range and wedges for those tight hops and sand catchers. Get stuck in the rough and it’s not a driver for you either. But firing a long shot doesn’t always help you in Cursed to Golf. Instead, you have to decide which driver to use to get over the obstacles, be it elevated platforms, sand traps, spikes, holes filled with dynamite, or even skeletal hands reaching out of the ground and grabbing your ball! There is much more here than a normal game of golf!
In addition to the weird obstacles, there are also packs of golf trading cards. Buying or earning a pack will give you 1-5 cards of different quality. Some might give you an extra hit or two, while others just let you call a mulligan and take the last shot. You can even buy cards in the pro shop along with changing outfits (although they usually suck).
Golf Purgatory doesn’t follow all the rules of physics, though, and you can do all sorts of fun and crazy things with your golf balls using trading cards. They double, make them U-turns, turn them into lead weights or exercises, and even fire with environmental effects like ice! This wacky mix of weird options really adds to the fun of playing. If you want to keep them, you can also throw your cards into an album in the pro shop, so you can be sure to have one if you fail in your efforts.
This is where Cursed to Golf gets a little hinky, though. Remember that the game is also a roguelike, so you never get the same courses in the same order. Instead they are all jumbled up and every time you fail you go back to the beginning and start over with a new random course. Your first set of holes will be led by a Legendary Golf Pro, a giant Scottish ghost who is quite hilarious. At the end of his course, you have to beat him beat by beat to advance to the next area, the desert. Here they introduce spikes for the first time.
Chances are you’ll hit the wrong button at some point in the game or get beat by a rival golf professional. If that happens, it’s game over for you. You lose every card in your inventory and it’s back to the beginning. But suppose you have arrived at the third golf pro. It’s back to the beginning of the game, not back to the beginning of the course! You’ll be right back with the Scot, crawling slowly through the game. Oh look, a new mechanic you’re not sure how to blast through. Failed, start again. Oh, that corner was a little off! Failed, start again. Hit the button at the wrong time, bounced back and that was my last hit. Game is over. You now understand where this is going…
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 keep up to 40 cards in your book in the pro shop, but it won’t be enough to master some of the later courses and they are remarkably difficult. You don’t get better clubs. You don’t go back to the start of a course, but to the beginning of the game, repeating the same areas over and over in a slow, methodical golf game and waiting for shots from other players on the last round is tedious. This isn’t Dead Cells or Rogue Legacy with high-speed interactive action. It’s golf. Wave that repeats itself endlessly without any sign of ceasing, even after you’ve progressed further than ever before but had no more extra strokes and now it’s back to where it started. Again.
The loop in Cursed to Golf is cursed in a word. It is a remarkably fun game that many players will simply give up because of a single configuration choice made by the developers. If you could continue from the new course you would have reached if you lost, Cursed to Golf would be a lot more accessible. But as it is, only those hards who want to grind up to 18 holes over and over will manage to come back to life in this odd game.
That’s a shame, honestly. Cursed to Golf is really fun to play. The challenge is good, the skill level required is high but achievable, and the crazy little quirks are a joy. But because there’s no real character growth, playing the entire game over and over loses its appeal and the gameplay gets stale after a while. Add to that the limited variety in later levels and you have a recipe that entices players with its cleverness and then leaves them flat once they get a real feel for the game.
If you’re a golf buff and you like quirky indie games, Cursed to Golf might be the game for you. The visuals are solid, the gameplay is generally well designed and even the music is quite catchy. But starting from scratch with no real changes in your skills is a real hindrance that will take out quite a few players. Temper your expectations and remember that this cute golf game hides a remarkably challenging game that will test your golf skills as well as your patience. If you’re still up for a chance, go for it. There’s a great game hiding behind some questionable gameplay decisions here 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.
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