In the curiously quirky Normal Golf Game, you find yourself stranded on a golf course and forced to conquer a deliberately malicious set of golf-themed obstacles. It accurately captures the feeling of being trapped, given how quickly it becomes a disappointing chore to complete.
Shanked It
Normal Golf Game builds its core gameplay around a complex and exacting golf swinging mechanic. Use your mouse to drag your club in a circle motion, building enough speed while precisely hitting the ball with accurate contact. You’ll need to aim your shot while adjusting for wind and line up the angle of your club to direct the ball towards the flag.
I found the swinging mechanic unintuitive, but this is somewhat by design. The entire experience is deliberately provocative and challenging. However, it also never changes in an interesting way. You unlock new clubs throughout the story with different physics on each club. Despite this, you’ll largely be repeating the same frustrating motions hundreds, if not thousands of times.
Un-Fairway
Normal Golf Game finds you isolated at a golf course being directed around by a maniacal version of Luke Muscat. Muscat is the actual developer of this game, as well as Fruit Ninja and Jetpack Joyride. This absurd premise allows for a lot of meta-textual humour that gels with the quirky gameplay.
The story mode sees you earning money by completing ‘bounties’, missions dotted along the golf course. These range from hitting a par or birdie on a hole, hitting objects with your ball or solving relatively simple puzzles.
The game doesn’t arrange the bounties around a clear progression of difficulty, giving you the freedom to approach goals in whatever order you like. But this creates a meandering grind as you search for your next goal. Sometimes you’ll be banging your head against more difficult missions before uncovering something unsatisfyingly simple afterwards. Quality of life issues create further irritation. If you activate a bounty to score a par on a hole and instead score a birdie, you only succeed for the par bounty. The birdie bounty then unlocks, forcing you to repeat something you’ve already done. Instead of providing genuine challenge, moments like this contribute to an overall sense of tedium.
The game culminates in a trial where you play all nine holes back-to-back. This does create a genuine white-knuckle challenge at times. However, it offsets it by letting you keep grinding bounties to unlock assists to make the round easier. By doing so, it feels like a lack of confidence in the central gameplay mechanic, an acknowledgement that mastering the golf swing for this big conclusion just isn’t much fun.
In The Rough
The game suggests that you play with a mouse and keyboard, and that advice absolutely holds true. It has controller support as well, but using the stick to swing is too awkward. It also has multiple difficulty settings, including an easier mode that stablises the angle of your club. This greatly reduces the most frustrating element of the game.
The overall presentation is basic and serviceable. The humans and golf clubs in the game come from real footage green-screened into the game world, and this effect is amusingly effective. Beyond that, the graphics and sound have a mostly generic quality — it even sometimes calls this out in its self-referential flavour text.
Double Bogey
The repetitive structure and lack of inventive escalation in the story puts too much pressure of a core game mechanic that isn’t compelling enough to support it. The game’s quirky premise offers some charming moments, particularly towards the very end. But too often the game squanders its outrageous setup by merely settling to cheaply outrage.
If you try the demo, you might find yourself in sync with the game’s mischievous mayhem. But for me, I’m all too happy to just sit in the clubhouse and let others play through.
Quest Daily scores Normal Golf Game:
5/10
Normal Golf Game is available September 21st on PC.
A review code for Normal Golf Game was supplied to Quest Daily for the purpose of this article.
