Desert Golfing

Is Desert Golfing a good game? I’m not sure. It’s certainly a frustrating game. From the physics which make the golf ball bounce just a little too far to the holes designed to infuriate you by making the ball roll just off the screen, the game seems determined to annoy you. On the other hand, it’s not cruel about it – there’s really no pressure to continue, and any goals are really ones you set yourself. This separates it from games like Getting Over It or The Impossible Game, where either the game taunts you (in the former case) or requires such precision that memorizing a sequence of inputs is the only path forward (in the latter case).

As you probably surmised, Desert Golfing is about golfing in the desert – an almost endless sand trap. After 10,000 holes, the game ends with a water trap, from which your ball will never return. There’s no timer, no penalty for failure (other than the stroke count increasing) – just you and an seemingly endless desert. On the one hand, this seems like it would be relaxing – but your own desire to complete a hole in a certain amount of time or number of strokes will always work against you.

This reminds me of Chezni’s experiences with Dark Souls – after completing the game, he tried completing the game in a variety of more challenging ways, finally stopping before completing a no-death run (curse you, Blighttown!). In the absence of structure or after mastering an existing structure, we tend to impose rules on ourselves – trying to complete a hole in 2 strokes or less every time, trying to speedrun the level in the shortest possible time, etc.. I’m not sure what that says about the human psyche, but it is interesting.

Normally, with frustrating games, my instincts to avoid meaningless difficulty kick in – why should I time my inputs perfectly when I might as well program a computer to do it, or why should I grind through the same 10 minutes of a game dozens of times just to have a single chance at success? Getting better at these inputs will only make me better at this particular game, not games (or life) in general.

In Desert Golfing, though, the long term gains are never taken away from you – very few holes will take more than 5 strokes to complete, and you’re always making progress towards an uncertain future. Perhaps my only real complaints with the mechanics of the game come in the form of “unfair” holes (see pictures 7-9 above for examples). Finding the precise input necessary to complete the hole falls under tedium rather than contemplative play, and are truly the only parts of the game which are un-fun. Compounding this, the ball rolls incredibly slowly (as you may know, I tend to prefer having Doom-guy levels of speed available to me) – which makes mistakes take long seconds to resolve.

In the end, you shouldn’t play Desert Golfing as a game – it’s a distraction. It goes to Tier Two because if you’re looking for something to do, you should definitely find a more engaging game. But if you’re stuck at the doctor’s office or in a boring meeting that you still need to pay attention to, Desert Golfing is the perfect level of distraction.

iOS Link