Developed by Damage State Ltd and published by Thunderful Publishing, they bring us a very nice game with roguelike elements. A “Golf-like”, that is how they define it, combines elements and mechanics of golf games with the classics of a roguelike.
Cursed to Golf It is available for PC, Playstation, Xbox and Switch.
A TERRIBLE DESTINY FOR THE CHAMPION
The game starts with a sequence in which our character, the golf champion, is about to win a tournament. This part is an introduction to learn the basics of the game, the full tutorial comes later. The commentators describe our character as the GOAT (which generally stands for Greatest Of All Time), only here to add comedy they clarify that he is Golfer Of All Time. And when we are about to take the last shot that will give us the championship, we are struck by lightning and we die.
This takes us to the underworld, but it is a very particular one. It’s all golf-themed, of course, and we’re greeted by a cheerful ghost to show us the peculiarities of this new world: El Escoces. He tells us that we can escape and come back to life if we complete an 18-hole golf course, a piece of cake for the champion, right? No, it’s not going to be that easy, golf in the underworld naturally has many peculiarities.
This tutorial is long, I spent almost an hour to complete it, part of the length is due to the fact that it is full of dialogue and animations, which explain everything in detail. It is within the golf games, quite simple. If we compare it with games like mario-golf, it is similar. The main difference is that Cursed to Golf moves everything to a 2D environment with verticality. But the classic is almost the same as most golf games, we have to measure the power and angle of our shots, and we have different clubs for different situations, all with the aim of moving the ball towards the hole.
GOLF LIKE YOU’VE NEVER SEEN BEFORE
Once we complete the tutorial we are released to play golf. The objective of the adventure is to complete all 18 holes in order to return to the surface. Being this game roguelike in nature, each hole or course is going to be randomly generated. Sometimes it works better than others, some patterns and obstacles are quite bad milk, and they can complicate us a lot if they play in a row. In the worst case, we can have a difficult or very long course between the first levels as well. The good thing is that they do not repeat each other much, so finding similar courses is very unlikely. In addition to that as we advance the settings will also vary.
We start each course with five shots available to take. Here we see the first of the particular rules of this golf, instead of having an ideal number of shots to score our performance, we need to do it with those that the game gives us as available. In order to complete the courses, we will need to replenish shots during the game. This can be done by using cards or by breaking special statues. The silver and gold statues, when broken, give us 2 and 5 extra shots respectively, unless we use cards that enable us incredible shortcuts, if or if we are going to have to break most of these along the way.
To help us get around the sometimes unfair obstacles of the courses, we can use these cards that I already mentioned, which act as spells with various effects. These range from adding extra shots, stopping the ball in mid-air, to manually directing it in the air and through obstacles. Every time we complete a course, they will give us a number of coins according to our score, which we can then use to buy these cards. Between hole and hole, we are going to advance through a map with multiple directions that we can take, that is where we can decide whether to go to the store to look for cards, or to more challenging holes. Some roads are going to give us free cards, this is very good when we just started the run and we do not have much money.
Another important mechanic, which we are taught after we fail a run for the first time, is the Spin. While the ball is in the air, we can with the directional and the assigned button give the ball a little directional influence, so that when it falls, it bounces in the direction that suits us best. I can’t put into words how vital it is to learn how to use this quickly, and how much it will help us improve our shots. A well done Spin can save us from 2 to 5 shots per course if we do it right, it gives us much more precision to leave the ball exactly where we need it, even if our shot is not perfect.
The courses are full of obstacles and traps, all very treacherous. Things start off calmly, with water traps and dynamite, but later on we will find spikes that if our ball touches them, we lose that shot immediately, as happens when it falls into the water. Some of these things we will be able to use to our advantage, the dynamites can explode and reveal shortcuts, or shoot the ball in another direction, there are also some portals that teleport the ball to another side, always getting closer to the hole. These obstacles sometimes force us to make very, very precise shots. Luckily we can help ourselves with some letters to overcome them.
Not only was the tutorial long, each course is quite long, and completing a game can take several hours. There is no roguelike review I do where I don’t have to mention Hadeshow well he did the genre and also how high he set the bar. Cursed to Golf It is not a roguelike to play frantically, it takes time to get the hang of it and reduce the number of errors per run that we make. In this sense, having such long games is much more like Registration. In my particular experience, this game seems better to be played in short sessions, I feel the courses are so long, they exhaust a lot.
The music and the sound section is the weakest point of the title. The entire soundtrack is inspired by retro tunes, but they are too strident and end up sounding repetitive. The pixel art is very good and everything is understood, but there are some strange decisions in the middle too, for example, all the characters and objects, when turning, make an animation as if they were a piece of paper that turns, reminding us how objects rotate Paper Mario. Not that that’s necessarily wrong, but I feel like it’s a bit off key.
System Requirements
MINIMUM: OS: Windows 7, 8 – Processor: 2.4 GHz Dual Core – Memory: 4 GB RAM – Graphics: GeForce GTX 960 / Radeon R9 380 or better – Storage: 4 GB available space