The UFO 50 diaries: Golfaria
Putt the fuck up
So listen. You know. I know. We all know that golf courses are an ontological evil. An incredibly on the nose representation of wealth gluttony and environmental irresponsibility.
But golf, the game? Quite fun. You can understand why people want to play it. There's boundless entertainment in watching skilled folk brave the elements and the laws of physics in order to pull literal miracles out of their pockets.
Birdies, bogeys and holes in one, it's a fascinating mix of precision sportsmanship and esoteric obstacle course, and golf as a video game is equally engaging, perhaps moreso given how easy it is to fudge that sense of mastery for the layman.
Recently I've started playing a Discord game with friends called Putt Party, which combines a sense of mastery with an even bigger sense of chaos. The resulting effect being a lot of laughs and some strong language from all involved.
Golfaria is not this, not to its detriment necessarily. It’s certainly not without whimsey, but its a peculiar blend of that precision action and a kind of separate resources based navigation puzzle, the end result of which has left my feelings mixed.
Golfaria plays exactly how you’d imagine, albeit with a much more pared down control scheme. You aim, you dictate the power of your swing, you commit, and the landscape and the elements determine what happens next.
There's little in the way of options at first. You don't have a selection of clubs, or shot styles beyond context sensitive actions. Although I can tell from the environments I've explored so far that there will be power ups designed to overcome specific obstacles, all the upgrades I've found merely increase the number of shots you can take before it's game over.
This is the interesting wrinkle of Golfaria, without which I think it would simply not work as a game. You have limits on what you can do. Shots must be taken with care. Obstacles must be reckoned with.
Much of my time with the game has been in two parts. One run, I scout the area, taking stock of what I have explored already and what I have not. The second run, I attempt to seek out something specific in the world.
This is not a roguelike, any progress you make is retained, although timing out will set you back to the last checkpoint, and these are very few and far between. By which I mean I’ve found only one so far, and it hasn’t instilled a sense of progress in me, if i’m being perfectly honest.
One of the irks I have with Golfaria relates to this. Once you hit a checkpoint, any run you start is determined by its location, even if you switch the game off. And depending on that location you might find yourself caught in a loop of sinking half your total shots simply getting to a place where you can start attempting an excursion. Friction may be the name of the game for Derek Yu and his cohort, but this feels incredibly mean spirited.
It might be that I'm just stuck in an unusually bad place in my game (underground, beset by shot-sucking mosquitos and hard to parse inclines that result in one step forward eight steps back) but it's certainly dampening my spirits considerably.
It's a funny old thing. I kind of like what it's offering, an unusually constrained version of a Zelda-like experience, fiddly at first but eventually grokkable, with the challenge being the need for a keen eye and a near omniscient plan of action for how you are going to tackle the obstacles before you.
When it comes to Golfaria, though, my patience for its frictional design and quirky physics is sadly not under par. I think I’ll stick with Putt Party for now.
