While browsing Apple Arcade, this silly golf game caught my eye, considering my and my brother’s mutual appreciation of minigolf games. It exceeded all my expectations with its surprising zaniness!

You start out simple enough: a low-poly, minimalist 3D golf game. Hit the ball at the flag. Then, your shot instead throws the club. Then, it throws the golfer. What the Golf works hard to continue subverting your expectations of what a golf game is. Soon you’re racing against sheep, doing monster truck jumps, or spitting into a flowerpot, and yet every new concept uses the same aiming/power-bar control mechanics. Every level also has two variants; sometimes a par challenge (occasionally dreaded) to limit your strokes, sometimes with other twists or requirements, riffing on the new ridiculous idea that each hole presents.

Between holes you’re playing as a ball in an Aperture-style mad science lab. You essentially use top-down minigolf mechanics to traverse this labyrinthine laboratory, solving puzzles and finding the way to the next hole and the next weird anti-golf variant. Finding out what offbeat request Triband will make of you, the player, next is quite addictive.

There’s even holes that homage or borrow ideas from other games, such as Katamari, Super Meat Boy, Super Hot, Angry Birds, etc. not to mention genre parodies with stealth or first person shooter-style challenges. There’s so much packed into this game, and yet it feels cohesive for the most part with a consistent physics engine and simple-to-grasp control scheme.

I experienced some control awkwardness, but that may just be the Apple TV gamepad support. And I would complain that it’s difficult to do low-power shots as the bar fills up very quickly, but really it’s seldom necessary to do so, and this quickness helps keep up the speedy pace of the game as a whole, with its rapid-fire mini-challenges. Different areas of the lab are themed, such as the car zone or the beach zone, so you have some idea of what to expect from groups of holes. The content is also broken up by a scheme of progressing through tiers of the lab, with regular confrontations with a mad computer to keep it structured. It reminded me of WarioWare: madcap hijinks with an underlying framework to the world.

I’m glad to hear the game is being ported to more platforms, as it’s a delightfully silly experience full of ideas and character (despite not really having any characters, per se). Plus, the final level promises a content patch incoming, which is exciting. I can’t wait to see what these mad Danes come up with next!