Cursed to Golf from Thunderful and Chuhai Labs is a very fun roguelike 2D golfing experience on Nintendo Switch. Learn more in our Cursed Golf review!

 

Cursed to Golf from Thunderful and Chuhai Labs is a very fun roguelike 2D golfing experience on Nintendo Switch. You’ll be playing as The Cursed Golfer who, as the name suggests, has been trapped in Golf Purgatory and must play golf… forever! That is unless he manages to take on the whole course and win a chance to return to the world of the living. It was during the 18th hole of the tournament – which also serves as the game’s tutorial – that your golf club was struck by lightning.

If you’re new to golf, you’ll need to know these basics. You’ll use your drive club for long-range shots so that the ball can travel further down the hole with a single hit. If you need to take a more precise shot, then you should take out an iron. An iron is best used for mid-range shots and can help you get through a tight spot. And then we have the wedge, which is best reserved for shorter shots that need some extra height. You can switch between golf clubs by pressing the Y button. The only exception for this is when you land in a bunker since you’ll be forced to use a wedge to get out of there.

Since the game is presented from a 2D sidescrolling perspective, making shots blindly will certainly curse you to an eternity of golfing with no way out! Instead of doing this, relax for a moment and think about what you’re going to do next. In order to get a better look at where you need to go next, use the right analog stick to nudge the camera around as needed. You can also press the B button to activate the Birdie Eye camera, which allows you to move the view around the entire hole so that you can plan your strategy accordingly. You’ll have to make good use of gimmicks such as a fan that will propel your ball to safety or TNT boxes that you can make go BOOM! to clear up a new path through a shortcut.

 

To progress through each course, you must also decide the amount of power for each shot you take so that you don’t end up in a bunker or have your ball land in a water hazard and waste one of your strokes. On top of that, you’ll also have to select the angle at which you’ll be taking the shot. All of this is very easy to do since you’ll just need to press the A button to stop the marker at the right spot on the power gauge and then press the A button again to stop the moving marker for the angle of your shot. If you make a mistake when stopping the marker for the power gauge, you can always press the B button to go one step back.

Once you land in Golf Purgatory, right next to the aptly named Eterni-Tee, you’ll be greeted by The Scotsman, who tells you that you’ve been cursed to golf for all of eternity. He runs Eterni-Tee, which happens to be a shop where one can purchase a variety of items that will help to make some progress towards reaching your ultimate goal: ascend so that you can escape Golf Purgatory to return to your life as a golf champion!

The thing is, you’ll have to complete all 18 holes in a single go with the allocated number of strokes at your disposal. Because of this, you need to make every shot count because if you run out of shots, you’ll be sent right back to the beginning of the whole course! This is where the roguelike elements kick in since you won’t be able to do this during your first run. Every hole has you start at 5 for the par meter, and with each shot you take, the par meter will count down. Reach zero, and you’ll fail and be cursed forever!

 

The good news is that there are some ways for you to increase the number of shots you can take. You’ll find idols along some of the different paths you can take down a golf hole. If you manage to smash an idol with your golf ball, you’ll gain additional shots to boost your par count. The regular idol will give you an extra two shots, so you’ll essentially recover the shot you’ve just used while also gaining one extra shot on top of that. And then we have the best one out there: the gold idol, which will increase your par count by four!

Going back to Eterni-Tee, it’s there that you will be able to purchase special Ace Cards with your hard-earned money, which can be used to overcome the negative effects of hazards or to add some bonuses to your character. How can you make the most of Eterni-Tee? By spending your money on some additional Ace Cards to add them to the Card Binder. Why? Because the cards in the Card Binder can be used during future runs, and that’s how you will eventually manage to complete a full run in Cursed to Golf. You can purchase the specific cards that are for sale or buy a booster pack of cards without really knowing what you might get.

And what can you do with Ace Cards? There’s one that will allow you to return to your previous shot, another one that will detonate your ball into three separate balls mid-flight so that you can choose one of them to continue your journey or an extremely useful Ace Card that can add one shot to your current par count. And then we have others like explode that will make TNT boxes within its radius do their thing, or practice shot, which makes your ball be destroyed at the end of the shot so that you can rehearse a shot without lowering your par count. You’re shown the power of Ace Cards during the extended tutorial. You can use a practice shot card to shoot a silver idol to gain two extra shots… without lowering your par count! You can then use explode to remove the TNT boxes to your right, and then use that shortcut to get to the next section of the tutorial in fewer strokes.

 

Since this is a roguelike game, that means you’ll be moving through a map as you decide which nodes to activate next. You can take different paths on the map as you decide which holes to take on and if you should take a detour to enter Eterni-Tee while also having to take on a cursed hole, which could prove to be fatal! Cursed holes will have a trickier layout to take on, thus considerably bumping up the challenge. Along with that, you’ll suffer through a variety of curses as you try to complete the whole. Not having access to our deck of Ace Cards can certainly ruin a run!

I was looking forward to checking out Cursed to Golf from the moment it was announced, and I’m happy to report that this is definitely one of the year’s highlights on Nintendo Switch. The gameplay is easy to get the hang of, and the roguelike elements don’t overwhelm the game experience. As you learn from your mistakes, buy more Ace Cards and store them in the card binder, you’ll start to progress further and further into the game until you can find the right combination of elements to finally ascend. The game features an excellent soundtrack from Mark Sparling that helps to elevate the whole experience – which is why you should totally go out and buy it by clicking right here. Cursed to Golf is out on Nintendo Switch with a $19.99 asking price, and it’s worth every penny!

Disclaimer
This Cursed to Golf review is based on a Nintendo Switch copy provided by Thunderful.