Golfing and roguelike, mashed together. As a golf game, Cursed to Golf is totally fine. As a roguelike, it is at least a double bogey.

There are some cool ideas here but its clear the game lacks balance as it throws shots at you and the lack of interesting choices means that this is a one and done. After finishing one run, I don't see myself picking up the clubs again.

Love the pixel art and music!

Roguelikes have invaded a ton of genres from management sims to card battlers to shooters to rhythm games, so it’s only natural that sports games would get in on the trend. And since Electronic Arts won’t make a golf game where the golfers are actually stuck in an endless purgatory, Chuhai Labs has taken to the course itself and done exactly that with Cursed to Golf. This stylized roguelike is a clever spin on the typical golf game, but it’s also sometimes difficult enough to snap a club in two.

Read the full review:
https://www.comingsoon.net/games/reviews/1235180-cursed-to-golf-review-ps5-worth-buying

The presentation is fantastic, with some of the nicest spritework I've seen in a while, a nice interface and a fantastic OST. The moment to moment gameplay is great fun and very addictive, trying to go through the courses in as few shots as possible and using the fun powers you get as consumables. It's very satisfying when you pull off a great shot and manage to ace the tricky ass courses the game has. Same goes for bosses, though I only fought one but I loved the feeling of a race against one of the game's charming characters, plus the music was 10/10.

But then it all honestly goes to shit for me due to the game's shoddy roguelike elements. There's a limited number of handcrafted courses that are randomly picked each run, which means that runs start to feel very samey as you start recognizing the courses. There's just very little variety between runs. Each run is also long as fuck due to lengthy levels, which makes failing feel like a complete waste of time since there's very little meta progression. Honestly, the roguelike element makes the game feel miserable to me, so I'm kinda calling it quits after having only beaten the first boss and seeing the kinda shit that awaits me in the next area.

It just would be sooo much better just not being a roguelike. Hell, a more traditional progression system could've potentially had even more replay value, such as by recording how many powers you used and how many shots you needed to beat a stage. Perfectionists would eat it up, trying to outdo themselves, but right now I can't imagine there's any replay value because it seems like a "once and done" game. So the roguelike elements just make the game too punishing without the usual pay off of having high replay value.

I dunno man, it frustrates me because the game is legitimately great except for this one "but", yet it's a massive "but" that ruins the game for me and makes me just decide to play something else. Would be a legit 10/10 for me if it weren't roguelike.

I like what the game is angling for, but it feels like it's missing something. I think the devs were a little too afraid of scaring people off to let the horror come out and play properly--the game is slightly too on the level about its own mechanics to be particularly scary beyond, say, the second archipelago or so. The plot is conceptually interesting, but the writing is pretty workmanlike video game text, so the story never really sunk its hooks in me unfortunately.

That being said! the gameplay loop is pretty fun, which is what sells it for me. The hodgepodge of survival-crafting progression, a classic fishing minigame fleshed out into the central mechanic, and Resident Evil inventory management puzzle was surprisingly addictive. Admittedly I think the balance is slightly undertuned? Unless I missed something there's not really any use for the final tier of upgrades and the actual gameplay is quite easy to optimize to a point that you're never cash starved, but I had fun with it regardless.

The other main appeal to me was just the joy of discovery in finding new fish and new messed up fish variants, which honestly never got old. It scratched a certain Pokémon itch of sorts for me, of just wanting to be introduced to more and more weird little dudes to catch, and to find out what sorts of weird monster evolutions they have. I honestly think i will go back and try to at least complete the standard fish journal because it's genuinely quite fun.

An aside--it has the strange feeling of being a game made by people whose main interests and inspirations are other video games. The writing feels like an attempt to write in a video-game style, in the specific manner of what it chooses to ignore (how is a fisherman dredging up a single loose belt buckle from the bottom of the sea for a greiving father?) versus what it chooses to focus on (getting magic powers to fill out your action wheel is described prosaically several times.) Every mechanic in it feels like it's based on something from a different game--the fishing is every fishing minigame you've ever played rolled up into one, the inventory management is Resident Evil and Tetris, the game world is constructed exactly the way the solar system in Outer Wilds is constructed down to a very obvious Dark Bramble ripoff. None of this is to say that I think the devs are unoriginal--in fact I think the mixture of many of these elements is quite novel--but I think the "thing that's missing" is a certain dynamism that I think having a wider range of influences would have brought.

Overall though a pretty cool game--if it sounds interesting to you it probably will be.

Relaxing fishing game combined with the Lovecraftian nightmares of the abyss.
Simply put fish, organize your inventory, Upgrade your boat, explore farther across the map meet lots of interesting people and help them with various tasks.
If you don't care for anything other than getting from A -> B the game can be finished in an couple of hours.
I personally took my time and explored all I could, stressed nonstop about the nighttime and shit my pants constantly, and it took me about 15 hours to get through the game. Once finished I went back and spent a couple more 100%-ing the game rounding out at about 20 hours.
With enough mini games and quests to complete to keep the game fresh for it's short run time it was a lot of fun.
While the game is light on the narrative its a hell of a story once all pieced together, I genuinely loved it.

Absolutely recommending this to everyone I know, especially if they're scared of ocean dwelling nightmares.