wfmag.cc \ 63One finger for puzzling par is all Ian needs in Golf Peaks
olf games are a right sort – your
straight-faced simulations, riddled
with real-world sponsorships and
people and courses and balls
(loads of fun), your less serious
games leveraging the whole fun of thwacking
things long distance over the constraints of petty
concerns like ‘realism’ (also loads of fun), and
plenty more. Afterburn’s Golf Peaks, released way
back in the misty past of 2018
on PC and mobile, certainly fits
into that latter description, and
I can’t stop playing it as a result.
Ostensibly, it’s a golf game.
It’s got ‘golf’ in the name, which
is usually a dead giveaway of
something at least intending to
include golf in it. That said, it’s hard to call Golf
Peaks a golf game. No, this is a puzzle game – it’s
about moving around squares using limited
movement cards, trying to get to a goal. It just
happens the thing you’re moving is a golf ball,
and the goal you’re moving to is a hole. It’s about
as close to golf as you’d get if you lived in a
society where golf hadn’t been invented yet.
Initially, I found that to be a bit of a let down –
I wanted a golf game for my fingers, something
to while away a few minutes here and there
on, wallop some balls about, scream ‘Fore!’ in a
greengrocers, that sort of thing. But that passed,
because this is a really good fun puzzle game,
that solid mix of straightforward premise and
depth of complexity in the situations you’re
presented with.
I’m not going to stick with it with any real
commitment, mind – there are no differing
approaches to be found to these solutions, no
individual thought celebrated. I’m not goingto be slicing something out of the deep rough
but somehow finding it pinging off the pin to
set up an easy birdie. You either don’t get to
the hole and reset (or go back a step), or you
do get to the hole and you move on. That’s it.
The challenge isn’t specifically in figuring out the
spatial puzzles, in sussing when and where you
should use a specific movement card – this one
hits the ball two spaces forwards, that one chips
it two and has a one space run-
on – I’ve found it’s actually more
about resisting the temptation
to just resort to trial and error.
You can, if you want. If you
want to remove almost
every aspect of thought
from Golf Peaks, you can just
systematically try out every potential move in a
level until you get it right. You won’t be punished
for that. I won’t, mind. I’ll stick with this one-
finger putting odyssey for a while, until I get
bored, and I’ll have got my money’s worth when
that happens. A testament to great mobile game
design, indeedy-doody.G
“I wanted to
scream ‘Fore!’ in
a greengrocers,
that sort of thing”Pitch-‘n’-putt
Everybody’s Golf
PS4, MULTI
If you’ve ever played the series
more than once, you’re surely
in love. Everybody’s Golf isn’t
the pitch (and putt) perfect
simulation some might want,
but it is, far more importantly,
a brilliant golf game.Sensible Golf
AMIGA, PC
Sensible Software’s great
failure still lingers with a bit of
a stench, to be honest, but all
the same, Sensible Golf is still
a nice time capsule to a world
just before the studio could do
no wrong.Desert Golfing
IOS, ANDROID, PC
A minimalist demi-art project
crossed with golf (in a desert),
Desert Golfing is simple, utterly
captivating, and – still, six
years later – bereft of any end
goal. Fabulous stuff.Golf PeaksNow playing
Wireframe
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