Normal Golf Game is abnormally realistic

I suspect Luke Muscat isn’t the kind of dev who’d be content to spend the next few years churning out course add-ons, but I for one would be glad if he did just that. Normal Golf Game has an irrepressible silly side, but behind all the witty writing and daft challenges lurks a truly superb golf sim somewhat short of holes.

Contour-rich, and dotted with interesting dog-legs and hazards, the nine-hole course that starts and finishes at this cheap charmer’s mystery-tinged clubhouse, is beautifully designed. Its size and solitariness, and the fact that you can’t play it in the company of bots or real opponents, are, I’d argue, NGG’s only meaningful shortcomings.

What about the dated visuals? Trust me when I say the nostalgic FMV avatar is more endearing than a polygonal one could ever be, and that within half an hour of clouting your first ball you’ll have stopped noticing the arch simplicity of the lighting and flora.

Now I’ve grown accustomed to NGG’s singular swing system, the ball striking in most other golf games feels very mechanical. Luke’s approach captures the complexity, physicality, and challenge of the sport quite brilliantly, and, thanks to three well thought-out difficulty levels, doesn’t have to lead to frustration.

Whether you’re wielding a driver, hybrid, iron, wedge or putter, walloping a dimpled sphere holewards involves rotating an aiming line left or right, and arcing your mouse cursor anti-clockwise in such a way that the stickman in the bottom-right corner of the screen thwacks the ball at his feet.

Swings are complicated by stance (adjustable), ball trajectories by wind, and club head speed, type, angle, and position. Opt to play at the lowest difficulty setting and the latter two factors are easy to control (you simply rotate and move the club head to the desired position with key presses, and are then free to concentrate on mousey precision). At default difficulty and above, club head position and alignment wobble slightly as you swing, meaning tiny mid-swing corrections and good timing are important.

Capturing golf’s unique combination of biomechanics and ballistics in a video game is far from easy. NGG does it incredibly well. Not only do clumsy swings produce hooks and slices, and thick and thin contacts, with care, practice, and skill, it’s possible to shape shots in a range of naturalistic ways.

Putting feels great too.

Rather than clog the early stages of the game with dozens of dull tutorials, Luke introduces and explains all this subtlety via a collection of light-hearted challenges. Expect to spend around five hours filling your bag with the full range of clubs, and to smile frequently and broadly during this extended initiation.

When you’re not trying to shatter hard-to-reach glasses of beer, bong distant gongs, land on fiendish special greens, or achieve tricky putting goals, you’re often reading amusing communiques from the dev/golf club owner, Luke. Half Stanley Parable narrator, half GlaDOS, said master of ceremonies is more than happy to break the fourth wall…

Although it only took me around seven hours to reach the game’s version of a boss fight, that final mission is a really formidable one, and many of the challenges scattered around the course remain unconquered. Keen to beat unbeaten bits, improve my technique at higher difficulty settings, and to play rounds on the fab nine-hole course, I can see myself returning regularly over coming days and weeks. This is no weekend wonder, but the rather brilliant Normal Golf Game needs a course editor and/or a selection of course DLCs to realise its full potential.