As with so many games that end up on this list, I played a demo of What the Golf? at one of the last PAXes before the world ended. At the time it was just a loop of some early levels that showed the progression from “its golf” to “it, at some point, was vaguely golf-related”. My takeaway was “is this an actual game or is it a collection of jokes?”, and I socked it away in the back of my head not likely to dig into it.

Turns out it’s in Apple Arcade, so after 100%‘ing Grindstone I jumped in.

What the Golf? is definitely a game now, but it’s also mostly jokes. Parody, referential humor, absurdist stuff, etc. All vaguely framed as “golf”, but eventually straying to the point that the only comparison is the interface of “pull back to make a trajectory arrow happen” and the limitation of “you only have x shots to make par”.

Structurally they threw the little microgames into a world map and grouped them thematically. Each level has 3 sub-variants. They’ll start off by introducing a gimmick, then have you prove mastery by requiring you to do the same with limited shots, then . . do something else entirely like a big absurdist evolution of the level. They’ll group four or five of these segments together and call that a “room”, two or three “rooms” open a “key”, two to four “keys” open the next world.

The strength of the game lies in its core mechanics, humor, and quality of gimmicks. The core mechanics are great, solid physics engine, solid ux / graphics, predictable and reliable building blocks that they use to build up a level. It works in 2D, it works in 3D, it sorta works in full 3D AR mode. Good job there. The humor is fine. It’s very Katamari Damacy. Here are some normal building blocks, see how normal they are? Oh no, if we arrange them like this it can get very not normal. The parodies of games like Portal, SUPER HOT, Super Meat Boy, etc were all pretty good.

The gimmicks, though, were where problems started to arise. The early ones were fine, but near the end they seemed to start running out of ideas, and ended up with stuff that just didn’t work. All the first-person AR levels sort of sucked, largely because there was no recenter button. Other gimmicks sucked because the controls were just . . very not good. And not charmingly bad, like legitimately bad. But that’s sort of par for the course with a game like this. Was every Wario-Ware Micro Megagame a slam dunk? No, there were a bunch that were infuriating or obtuse. And they were made by an actual normal size video game team, not by 3 dudes with Unity.

Collectibles were good, not crazy hard requirements, not super hidden, just hidden enough. I missed one sequentially over the course of my playthrough, and went back to get it afterwards. Similar with difficulty, it was just hard enough. I only noped out of a couple levels on my first pass through the game, and typically after I’d clear a room or a key section, I’d be familiar enough to go back and clean up any level I didn’t get a crown on.

I 100%’ed it after less than a week worth of casual play while supervising a toddler.

Strongly Recommended if you have an Apple Arcade subscription. Is it worth $20 on Switch? Ehhhh probably not, not confident that the interface would translate well. $20 on Steam? Also not sure. But definitely worth it if you’re looking for stuff to justify Apple Arcade.