Very few games are more cursed than golf. It doesn’t take much more than a ball hopping the cup because it was going a bit too fast, or misjudging an angle by just enough to land in a sand trap, to realize that each round can be its own little purgatory. That’s taken to its literal extreme in Cursed to Golf, a new game announced today that’s half pixel-art platformer and half golfing adventure. When a golfer is struck by lightning he ends up in Golf Purgatory, which isn’t quite so extreme as Golf Hell in that there’s a way out if you’re good enough. Survive 18 holes on a limited number of shots and it’s back to the world of the living, where fame and glory await. It seems like a fair offer except for each course being a maze of water hazards, spikes, TNT, fans, teleporters, and other hazards and helpful aids scattered around the landscape. And much like real-word mini-golf, there’s always the most dangerous hazard of the little edge that just barely nicks the ball, sending it bouncing away from its near-perfectly angled trajectory.
While the golfer needs to survive a full 18 holes, Cursed to Golf is a semi-roguelike in that there are eighty different courses available and each round is a created from a random selection. That lets the game be both hand-crafted and keep the player on their toes, never quite knowing what’s next. Like any good roguelike, though, the golfer gets power-ups to help take the edge off the randomness, and in this case that’s a selection of Ace Cards that you can play to break out abilities like shooting three balls at once or a guided-missile rocketball, take a mulligan, get a bird’s-eye view of the course to plan a better path to the hole, and a small deck’s worth of other game-tweaking upgrades. With the right cards and a lot of skill maybe it’s possible to golf your way out of purgatory, but no promises.
Cursed Golf isn’t coming out until some time in 2022 but the new trailer explains it in fairly good detail. Give it a watch below, and if you’re really curious there’s a very early prototypeover on itch.ioyou can play.
