Developer: Triband
Publisher: Triband / The Label
One or Two Player
Microsoft Windows / Apple Arcade / Nintendo Switch
[Warning: Huge Spoilers]
There are those games which, with a little personality, which can make even an already solid gaming mechanic able to soar. There are genres in video games in particular which have been replicated over and over the decades which however are forgotten in terms of ephemera, titles which can be taken and pushed to its extreme and/or aesthetically in a form for something memorable. Whilst WHAT THE GOLF's story is set around golf being boring, golf as a video game concept is an enticing one. Nothing is inherently wrong with golf as replicated in video game form, different from the real game as anyone can play it without resources. Like fishing games however, you could just recreate the real game over multiple platforms over decades and they all bleed into other, finding their way into second hand bins and charity stores even if the mechanics are perfection. The image of golf, only a player of miniature golf myself, is frankly a middle to upper class pastime of artificially made planes of green grass with middle aged men in vests and slacks. Golf's basic mechanic in most games - a drive bar you have to wait to hit at a certain strength, maybe worry about different types of putting/driving golf clubs too to choose from - is not the issue in the slightest, but what would fascinate me more is to see all the weird and colourful attempts to make golf more vibrant in pixels and polygons.
Mario held a putter many times, Sega Saturn has Valora Valley Golf (1995), which in its real Japanese title The Hyper Golf ~Devil's Course~ emphasises playing on lovely putting green surrounded by hellfire, with the additional surrealism of digitised graphics with real people animated, and then there is Ribbit King (2003) is a game of " Frolf", hitting catapults to launch living frogs to hop into the holes. WHAT THE GOLF initially starts off taking itself seriously, where you pull the mouse (or the touch pad on a mobile phone) back to charge your shot and direct the ball into the hole...then suddenly it is the golfer who is flung at the hole, the flag the real target, in the next challenge, before you put the golf ball and the beginning credits start properly. Here the review needs to emphasise spoilers as just explaining WHAT THE GOLF any further, from Danish developers Triband, will reveal so much of how weird this gets. Those who want to play this blind, this review will have the following little review-within-a-within, that it is an exceptional hybrid of golf with a puzzle game structure, alongside some very weird moments where this is not a golf game. Inexplicably the golfing shot mechanic for hitting golf balls can be used in other mechanics, even shooting, and those who want to play the game blind, go do so and enjoy yourself in its silliness. Those who want to read on, be prepared that the experience is not the same as reading it, and is delightfully strange regardless of how much you know going in.
For starters, the main story mission, as yes this has a story mode, has you hitting the golf ball around an abandoned science lab to reach each challenge, unlocking the chance to clear through the sentient computers guarding the next section and so forth. This becomes grimmer in a bleakly humoured way, when eventually you learn scientists trying to reinvent golf in the lab lost their minds, and led to the lab being taken over by the computers and their experiments. For all the cute turtles and critters, you find yourself going through a variety of golf puzzles that lead to something monstrous, and even before you get there each challenge in front of you has three different versions each. The first is the one you need to complete to move on, whilst the other two are for completion, the second usually getting by or below the par of limited shots, the third for a crown the most esoteric version of the challenge. This obviously leaves the lure for a player to want to beat them all, and originally designed for Apple Arcade, this game's mobile origins are there in the pick-up-and-play mentality of a little game here, get addicted into playing as much as possible without realising how many hours have passed. WHAT THE GOLF also happens to be an aesthetic beauty with legitimate eccentricity.
Set around themes, you will find yourself having to negotiate around footballers, exploding barrels and cars among other obstacles, and this is before taking in how the game mechanics can be altered let alone the object you are meant to hit. There is a first person shooting range game or two, as there is a platforming level or two, or as least likely a Metal Gear Solid parody to have transpired, where the swing mechanic somehow works for stealth sneaking around searchlights, among one or two times where you have completely wandered off the course of this being "golf". The developers themselves choose golf to parody on purpose1, but they use the mechanics as fully as you can get them without the game being unplayable. The parodies themselves are the only jokes which tie this to a time period, and even then, they are fascinating in bending the golf mechanics. As someone who has not played Superhot (2016), an experimental first person shooter where time stops when you do not move, allowing you to plan ahead, the parody here "Super Putt" was both funny and inventive. Having a taster, where you avoid indicated bullet trajectory from burning red figures in pure white areas, also showed the virtues of the source game's innovations through a parody. Even before these parodies, which appear in a batch midway through, this is already the game you will putt a TV to hitting cats as targets, with nothing off the table, including packing furniture into a moving van and putting the house itself after it.
Even when the game map itself abruptly changes on you, ending up in a row boat at one point, WHAT THE GOLF keeps you on your toes, more so even the encounters with the computers are boss fights, little challenges where you malfunction them and blow a hole literally in them to move on. Yes, this is still golf (most times) which is funny in itself. Originally, for a mobile phone, it has that pick-up-and-play presentation to chip away at challenges, but this also thankfully happened to be an aesthetically charming creation with a lot of love to it. Including the bonus modes, there is a great deal, such as story modes where you get to help at a disco for dogs, its iconography (dogs, black cats, an obsession with hotdog carts) winning me over in its bright toy set appearance. The music by Sune Køter Kølster is as bright and silly as the visual content. With the title sung in a cappella, there is even a level to play involving this as the obstacle, as there are levels parodying Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), and the Guitar Hero parody where, yes, the golf mechanics inexplicably is used to play cords, which even awkwardly bolted together never outstays its welcome and works for humour.
Just sticking to the original story - not the bonus stories fixated on the putting holes (and holes in general), the Christmas campaign about acquiring pizza for turtles, the sports one or the challenges/multiple player options, even the create a course option - you get the least expected and awesome final boss in the least likely of contexts too, which finishes a strong game in a perfect way. As mentioned early, the story is surprisingly grim; the result of scientists going insane is eventually turning a story map into something mutated. Their obsession to implement golf in any form, even finding meaninglessness in the world if golf is boring, is what is the context behind the many weird challenges you have, but also that the experiments are so bad that alongside all the broken debris, you find mutant living rooms and the final act has pink goo everywhere. You find yourself in a final battle against a toad creature which is in multiple acts, each a stage, be it escaping past little grey aliens to literally putting down a beast's throat. It is ridiculous, memorable and insane, and WHAT THE GOLF even has its thank you and credits as a bonus challenge for easy points afterwards, which is the cherry on top of this bizarre and lovely golfing cake. The aforementioned bonuses add to the game as well, but the original game itself was special, and truthfully, WHAT THE GOLF managed to even surpass my great interest in the game originally into something more spectacular and surreal.
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1) Triband, in an interview with Game Developer for a November 1st 2019 web article, expressed that choosing golf was as choice for the developers, since it is a game stereotypically for rich people, that "seemed like a safe target to ridicule", creating ideas in mind how one creates jokes. Considering the interview inexplicably leads to a recipe for a banana cake midway through, and it is a short interview which only lasts seven minutes long to read, emphasises Triband's desire to embrace the silly.
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