A lot of people may have decided to pick up on golf after watching some Tiger Woods matches on TV, or after growing up with games like Mario Golf and PGA Tour. They would soon realise that the sport is a lot more complicated than expected, with every single angle change, wrong positioning or poor swinging resulting in a failed stroke. No game has ever managed to recreate the frustrating sensation of actually realising that golfing is one hell of a complicated sport. That is, until now. Enter Luke Muscat, a seasoned Australian game developer, with his latest indie title, Normal Golf Game.

See, he’s more avantgarde in his objectives than Mario in his golf games.

The name Luke Muscat might sound irrelevant to unaware gamers, but you have played his games in the past. He is the man behind the creation of titles such as Fruit Ninja and Jetpack Joyride. He knows how to make something that is seemingly accessible and easygoing at first, intentionally frustrating once you get a hold of it, but never infuriating enough to make you want to ragequit. On the contrary, he knows how to make a frustrating gameplay become somewhat addictive. That is exactly the premise behind Normal Golf Game. It teaches you, in striking detail, how to swing a club onto a golf ball, to the point of almost feeling like a Masterclass. And then throws tons of odd challenges at you to see if you were really paying attention.

Luke Muscat, the game’s creator, talks directly to you during certain moments. What an honor.

The thing is: swinging the club isn’t just a simple act of aiming and pressing a few buttons. Normal Golf Game adopted a bizarrely realistic approach, in which you have to properly align the angle of your club against the ball, the shakiness of your hands, the actual angle of the shot you want to take, and then a proper swing of the club with the right analog stick, where you have to take into account factors such as strength and height of your swing. Yes, you can (and will) strike the ground more times than you’d like. Just like in real life, the frustration of figuring out that golfing is a lot more complicated than what Mario made it look like. But not an impossible task.

A neat little nod to his previous creation, the iPhone classic Fruit Ninja

You can get used to the controls. They are meant to piss you off, but I wouldn’t call Normal Golf Game a ragequit simulator in the style of Getting Over It With Bennett Foddy or Baby Steps. It’s just a gameplay loop that is very hard to understand, akin to golfing in real life. To spice things up, Luke Muscat constantly breaks the fourth wall and gives you additional objectives that go beyond the simple act of playing a 9 hole session. You might need to freely explore the environment in first-person to look for hidden objects, smash gigantic props protected by invisible barriers, and in one specific case, actually quit a mission in order to beat it. Yep. Don’t ask.

Yes, the game looks quite cheap. But I honestly think it’s by design. The gigantic props used as targets or obstacles are low-poly and simplistic as hell, with an “asset store” vibe, but even the game itself realizes that. The tongue-in-cheek nature of the storytelling and overall setting lands more often than it doesn’t. Even if Normal Golf Game is, without a doubt, a bit pretentious, it never passess off as an overly smug experience. It’s a subversive meta game, and for the most part, the combination of awful controls and funny objectives works well.

Don’t ask. Just follow the rules.

This is a very silly golf game with a lot of innovative ideas and a control scheme that, while intentionally made to infuriate, fits in perfectly with its setting. Normal Golf Game manages to make its frustrating gameplay loop feel inviting and approachable, and due to how well it teaches you its mechanics, and how it presents its many optional objectives once you beat its long tutorial. It might look cheap, some of its jokes might not always land, but for the most part, I appreciated its sense of humor. In no moment did I feel like quitting this bizarre little sports game. If anything, its structure made me want to play it even more.

Normal Golf Game is available now on PC.

Reviewed on Intel i7-12700H, 16GB RAM, RTX 3060 6GB and Asus ROG Ally.

A copy of Normal Golf Game was provided by the publisher.