I knew What The Golf? was brilliant just a few minutes after it began. An early hole was structured such that I could bank a shot off a mound and a get a hole in one, as opposed to sloppily shooting around an obstacleâin this case, some cats chilling out nearby. Setting up this shot made me feel clever. I charged up my meter and sent the ball soaring. It bounced off the mound and into a nearby cluster of explosive barrels, which proceeded to blow up all of the cats. I laughed out loud in surprise. Since then, many What The Golf? levels have made me do that. Laugh out loud in surprise, I mean, not blow up cats, although thatâs happened a fair amount, too.
This piece originally appeared 10/3/19. Weâve bumped it today for the gameâs Switch release.
What The Golf?, which is out now on PC and the Apple Arcade, posits two ideas that seem contradictory at first: Regular old golf is boring, but also, with a little bit of ingenuity, anything can (and should) be golf. Moving furniture around? Itâs golf. Avoiding traffic? Itâs golf. Propelling your own fleshy bone bag of a body through the air? Itâs golf. Golf can happen anywhere, at any time, without notice. In an office, in space, in a side-scrolling platformer level complete with parody Super Mario Bros music, except with lyrics that just say âwhat the golfâ over and over again.
All it takes is a simple swing meterâyou know, the kind you can aim in a direction and charge by holding a button, like the ones in all the other golf games you have or have not ever played. What The Golf? slaps that little, arrow-shaped sucker on everything under the sun, as well as things above and around the sun, like literal planetary bodies.
Itâs a shotgun confetti blast of absurd ideas, where many levels last mere seconds, but theyâre guaranteed to get at least a smile out of you, if not a full-blown golferly chortle. What The Golf? never stops escalating, always finding some silly new thing to turn into golf. I had to pause the game when it tossed me into a Flappy Bird clone with golf mechanics; I couldnât help but put the controller down and physically applaud its willingness to be as hog-bonkers ridiculous as possible with its core conceit.
Another especially inspired level had me load furniture into a moving truck usingâwhat the golf else?âthe golf swing meter, at which point I assumed Iâd then golf the moving truck to my new destination. Nope. Instead, the truck began to move of its own volition, and I had to follow it by golfing a house, sending it tumbling down a neighborhood street. There are also elegantly simple goofs, like a level where you golf a regular hole into a giant hole in the ground shaped like the number one, thus scoring a âhole in one.â If What The Golf? canât make you laugh, you might be dead inside. Or a 65-year-old retiree who treats golf with a grave seriousness.
Underlying all these jokes are some surprisingly savvy game design chops. Levels are housed in an experimental golf-laboratory overworld you can explore (as a ball), but itâs mostly an excuse to let you revisit levels at your leisure. Thatâs when the real fun begins. Every level has two additional challenges that stretch the initially silly gag ideas to their limits. Some challenges involve hitting parâfinishing a level in, say, six shotsâwhile others force you to execute nail-biting maneuvers like golfing an easily breakable flower vase into a hole while wind causes it to swerve erratically and nearly shatter against a variety of obstacles.
My favorite challenges, though, are the ones that dial up the absurdity to preposterous meta levels. For example, in one level, the thing I was trying to golf into a hole was the golf meter itself, and the challenge version of that level suddenly switched to a top-down perspective and had me whirl the golf meter around the hole to stave off a tower-defense-like swarm of enemies trying to invade it. The game did not even try to explain why any of this was happening.
What The Golf? is a master of that rare sort of comedy where jokes emerge not from dialogue or situations but from the game mechanics themselves. It nests jokes within each other, first making you laugh at what youâre doing and then laugh even harder when it turns that mechanic on its head. Itâs a clever little game that seeks to delight at every turn, and, occasional frustrating levels aside, it succeeds with flying colorsâwhich are, of course, flying because you golfed them into the air.
