Damien Crawford's Golf Experience 2024

Truly captures the experience of not being very good at golf. There's a quiet meditativeness to whacking a ball out into a snowfield or rainstorm and wandering around where you think it should have landed to try to find it, and even approaching the occasional par score feels like a real accomplishment.

I've never golfed a day in my life but I'm entirely certain that this game is an accurate depiction of what golfing would be like. I struggled to pick a club. I wandered around trying to find my ball after hitting it into a small depression on the fairway. I got lost. I tried putting the ball into the hole only to overshoot it, and then undershoot it, and then overshoot it again. I golfed on the moon. Also plays great on Steam deck so I can enjoy/suffer this experience from the comfort of my bed.

This is a very cool game that is definitely not for everyone. I'm not sure what I expected from it, but finishing a hole in 4 strokes felt like a huge accomplishment. If I had to summarize, I would say this game is a struggle (affectionate)

"The monotony of the golfing experience is hard to describe in text, it isn't as quick as "hit the ball and then walk" makes it sound. You have plenty of time to think in the process of walking to the ball, and in navigating the menus to plan a swing, which leaves a lot of room for speculation. I nail a fairway wedge shot across a patch of rough onto the green, even though I still don't really know what I'm doing, but now I'm saying golf sentences like that to myself, like I understand ANY of this. [...] You are simply here to play. To make decisions that have results, yes, and results may vary, but it is not in the results, nor their variance, but the deciding itself. The frame fades away, and there is nothing but the golf course. The very experience. The Damien Crawford Golf Experience." Read the rest of my review here!: https://guildmastergrouch.com/damiencrawfordsgolfexperience

10/10 Jack Nicklaus would be proud

The whole experience reminds me of the first time I played golf irl, and honestly this experimental, slightly obfuscated gameplay and silly tongue-in-cheek style of play really captures the weirdness of the whole concept of golf in a minimalist way. Good low-poly style too.