Review: Vertiginous Golf

‘Golf,’ and other four-letter words

Golf has a centuries-old reputation as being a maddening game. It’s simple in premise, but that simplicity is always lost in transition from theory to execution. “Put tiny white ball in tiny cup” sounds easy enough, but after a water hazard, a few muffed shots, and countless curse words later, you’re dreading the second hole.

Vertiginous Golf is similarly maddening. But, not for the reasons one may think. This game is less full-blown links and more first date favorite, mini-golf. However, almost everything it attempts is akin to trying to putt from the corner while up against a concrete barrier. You know that helpless and lost feeling? That’s Vertiginous Golf in a nutshell.

Vertiginous Golf (PC)
Developers: Kinelco, Lone Elk Creative
Publisher: Surprise Attack Games
Released: May 6, 2015
Price: $14.99 

It’d be short-sighted to say that the developers’ intent for Vertiginous Golf isn’t worthy of a modest golf clap. There’s no question that it would have been perfectly appropriate for them to design some wacky obstacles, slap on some ground-based golf physics, and call it a day. Instead, they opted to invent sprawling, labyrinth-like holes, and take an earnest stab at crafting a story about oppressive industrial-era society.

Heady stuff, to be sure. Unfortunately, neither works as well as one may hope.

When Vertiginous Golf first transplants the player from dingy street-side shop to above-the-clouds links, it’s a sight to behold. It’s almost as if BioShock Infinite had a mini-game smack dab in the middle of it (the classist undertones parallel holds up, too). The holes look complex, almost with a Rube Goldberg-ian quality about them — except different parts aren’t dependent upon one another in any way; they just present several unique challenges all within one hole.

In the early going — when the game is teaching the player the ropes — this works fantastically. Lengthy as the holes may be, they’re never too excessive in scope. It’s always apparent where the cup is, and what potential routes there are to get there. That doesn’t last long.

Once Vertiginous Golf  has the player comfortable with the mechanics, it quickly broadens everything so that nothing is digestible. From the tee box, the player is met with a mess of obstacles, all of it just as dense vertically as it is horizontally. Walls often obscure any long-range view, so it’s nigh impossible to go into the hole with a game plan. Just hit the ball with some degree of power and pray for the best.

The developers obviously foresaw this as a potential problem and added a feature to help mitigate it. Always accompanying the floating golf club is a metallic hummingbird which can be controlled to fly around the course and get the lay of the land. However, it’s mostly rendered useless as so much movement can happen on any given shot that it’s often still impossible to predict where the ball may go.

That isn’t the only concession that Vertiginous Golf‘s creators made. There’s also a rewind function (effectively a mulligan) which can be used sparingly in the likely event of an ill-advised shot. Drawing from the same pool of resources is the ability to guide the ball ever-so-slightly in any given direction.

If that weren’t enough to frustrate mini-golf purists, there’s also a pitching wedge that’s available almost all the time. Often times, the best way to traverse Vertiginous Golf‘s unforgiving terrain is to simply bypass it all through the air. Aim for a spot, hope you picked an apt shot power, and don’t worry about all the randomness that comes with the ground obstacles. While effective, implementing this strategy feels a bit like missing the point.

However, the wedge can’t be used to completely game Vertiginous Golf. The latter part of most holes are in a sort of walled-off container where using the club is banned. Not coincidentally, this is also where the game is at its very worst. Whenever near the walls of these areas (a frequent occurrence), the camera will line up outside the structure, forcing a putt toward the hole with an obscured view. It’s barely manageable if there’s a straight shot; in the event that there are moving obstacles or a raised cup, resign yourself to taking even more strokes.

As the golf portion of Vertiginous Golf is lacking in execution, the story similarly comes up short. In fact, it’s actually detrimental to the golfing experience. There’s a narrative about a raging class war in a dystopian society, and — well, it’s all very difficult to follow. That’s because the plot is only told through audio logs, which are mandatory checkpoints on the golf course. Once these are hit, the talking begins.

This falters because each audio log consists of approximately 30 seconds of overwhelming dialogue. To fully take it in means to put down the controller and listen. Given that there are usually four on any given hole, that’s a lot of listening and not a lot of playing. This is at direct odds with the action-oriented golf. The narrative and gameplay are so dissonant from one another that it’s nearly impossible to enjoy both at the same time.

Really, it’s the developers’ ambition that weighs down Vertiginous Golf. They took a simple, beloved concept and tried doing too much with it. As a result, the course design is rarely rewarding and the elaborate story is poorly presented. No matter how far above the clouds this game is, it landed in the rough.