Everything Is Sports And Nothing Is Boring In ‘What The Golf?’

For a game that flatly declares golf “boring,” What The Golf is one hell of a golf game. It’s a title that turns everything into golf — even some of you favorite other video games like like Portal, SUPERHOT, Donkey Kong, and Frogger — while sharing its disdain for the traditional world of quiet courses, serene nature, and a distinct lack of cats on the course. That’s because if you ask the Danes behind the hilarious physics simulator, everything is actually a golf game when you really think about it.

“We wanted to kind of — I think it’s a bad word — but we wanted to kind of show off. Show you that those game mechanics that were in that game that you loved so much? It’s basically a golf mechanic,” said Rune Drewsen, a co-founder of Tribrand, which made What The Golf? “The only game that’s not golf is What The Golf? But all the other games that you’ve played? Even Assassin’s Creed. That’s golf.”

Unlike Golf Story, an indie heavily influenced by Mario Golf‘s arcade simulation, What The Golf? is more a physics engine designed to make you giggle unexpectedly. And by minimizing the seriousness of golf with some extremely silly mechanics, it makes a distinct political point without having to make it obvious. The folks behind the game “don’t have anything against” golf, but they do think the “rich man’s game” is certainly deserving of a bit of video game scorn.

“I think it’s super important when you do satire or whatever in some kind of sense that you’re kicking up. You should never kick down in society and I’m pretty sure that golf is one of the games that actually led to most countries’ downfall in a way,” Drewsen said. “I’m pretty sure that a lot of coups and stupid business sh*t have been planned on the golf course. I’m not sure any coups have been planned on the table tennis table or something like that.”

What The Golf? starts simply enough: a cartoon golfer stands on a tee with a cartoon hole in the distance and some cats curiously in your way. The controls are even simpler: use a single button and your joystick to get the ball to the hole and advance along. But it quickly turns into much more than that, and a bullet time-like system of slow motion helps you navigate through levels with your ball still in motion. Repetition is key to the laughs, as well as how you progress through and learn new ways to complete levels. Soon the same hole setup plays out very differently.

Subsequent holes get more and more outlandish and creative. There are some serious shades of titles like Baba Is You or Wario Ware that make for some inspiring and unexpected level design — think courses where the power meter of your “golf” shot suddenly becomes a bat to propel other objects forward or different gravitational forces from planets in a space-themed mini level. As you play through the laboratory setting of the campaign, your golf ball turns into various other objects…