Luke Muscat is the designer behind ultra-hits like Fruit Ninja and Jetpack Joyride. Those games excelled due to their accessible, simplistic control schemes. His upcoming project, Normal Golf Game, is taking a different approach. An absurdist swing at 18 holes, Normal Golf asks you to play an unreal round with all-too-real input considerations.
In the brief demo, you arrive at the local club to discover a six-figure tee fee and also your car has been towed. Asked to take down outdated parking signs, you’ll discover just how steep the course ahead really is. While a conventional golf game breaks down swing strength, curves and stances to power meters and compasses, nothing is taken for granted in Normal Golf.
Your swing is executed with a whip of your mouse (or joystick). The angle of your club is divvied between four separate inputs, and it sways and swerves unsteadily in your hand. This doesn’t even take into account the weather, which you have no control over, or the lack of an overhead map of the hole, which was always a little supernatural to begin with.
It has a charmed, Bennett Foddy-like quality to it. All basic swings are obliterated into a balancing act, stretching dexterity thin like a waiter juggling a dozen hot plates. Checking and gauging each atom of your stance also feels like becoming your own father, paternally calling to yourself to square your shoulders every three seconds. You’ll be lobbing balls at gongs, bowling pins and giant toilets. The compelling thing about this demo is how this ultimately captures the golfing experience a lot more accurately than the discretely controlled feeling of your traditional sim.
A low-poly landscape, pierced by a FMV rendered dude as your avatar, Normal Golf is a clear callback to Microsoft’s original Links series. Those brought the weekend nine into the office cubicle. My favorite of the Links games is the much maligned Links Extreme, which added explosives and haunted swamps. It’s dumb and dated on arrival, which is why critics lambasted it and why I appreciate it more than the others. Normal Golf Game is flipping back to these first pages, before the tiny pencil etched the rest of the book. Positing that a more brutally realistic golfing simulator was always within reach. You just might break your rod in two trying to get out of a bunker, is all.