I’m not a golfer.
My first time on a golf course was the 9-hole pitch and putt in Debdale Park when I was ten. I pestered my Grandad Dennis to take me before our Sunday dinner one afternoon. After what must’ve been six months of cajoling, on a rare sunny day, he finally relented. Approaching retirement, he’d never played, either.
I was a decent sporting all-rounder as a kid. A bedroom windowsill cluttered with tenpin bowling trophies. Opening bowler for my primary school cricket team. A nippy winger-cum-backup-goalie for its football side. I even won the three-legged race and welly wanging competitions on sports day.
So, confidence was high when we approached the first tee. The green elevated on a small plateau fifty yards distant. I’d seen Nick Faldo, Ian Woosnam and Sandy Lyle dozens of times on Grandstand, so while I wasn’t expecting anything as dramatic as a hole-in-one — I’m not Kim Jong-Il, after all — I thought I’d at least get some purchase on the dimpled ball resting by my feet.
I took a practice swing to get my bearings. Giving it a little too much throttle, the weight of the pitching wedge played havoc with my balance, pirouetting me anti-clockwise and almost clonking my grandad on his scalp. No problem, I’ll get the hang of it.
I didn’t.
Four attempts to hit the ball missed their mark. A queue formed behind us. They weren’t dressed in paisley socks and plus fours, but this group of blokes had brought their own clubs.
‘C’mon. Hurry up, our E,’ Dennis said.
‘Don’t worry,’ I replied. ‘I’ll whack it this time.’
And I did.
The only problem was that instead of sailing towards the green in a smooth arc, the ball somehow contrived to defy the laws of physics, squirting backwards and coming to a rest at the toes of the waiting Mancunian hardmen.
‘I think you’d better let us go first, kidder,’ one of them said.
Now, I’m ancient enough to have taken a mulligan on the Atari 800 version of Leaderboard. I hacked my way around Sawgrass on the original PGA Tour Golf, squinting into a monitor heavier than John Peel’s record collection. Yet that formative circuit of Debdale Park remains my only stab at IRL golf.
Ian Burke’s Golf Experience 1989 is the essence of Damien Crawford’s Golf Experience 2022. You take the role of a total novice. Not just someone who has never walked down a fairway before, but someone whose knowledge of golf extends about as far as how to spell it.
The titular Damien Crawford is the overlord of Cannibal Interactive. He’s made a name for himself in the self-explanatory-RPG sphere with titles such as ‘This Dungeon Only Gets Worse as You Go Further’, ‘It’s Six Random Characters and a Single Floor Dungeon, That’s the Whole Game’, and ‘I Have Low Stats but My Class is “Leader”, So I Recruited Everyone I Know to Fight the Dark Lord’. If video games don’t work out, he could make a solid living by writing subtitles for self-published romantic novels on Amazon.
Fluffy clouds, like cartoon sheep with dismembered limbs, rise above the short horizon to welcome you onto the course. There’s no signal of where the flag might be from the tee. No rangefinder or oracle of a caddy. You just follow your instincts and hope the mid-green fairways don’t turn into the darker shaded rough, or bunkers the same burnt orange as the soil in the Australian interior.
There are seven clubs at your disposal, each with their own sound effect. The 7-wood comes with a martial arts thwack straight from a Tony Jaa movie. The 7-iron could be a blacksmith knocking a wrought-iron gate into shape, while from personal experience, the wedge is the aural doppelgänger of dropping a five-kilo sack of sunflower seeds on a patio.
Each club gives you three levels or oomph. ‘Cautious approach’, ‘Moderation,’ and ‘Full send it’. Much simpler than power gauges or mouse swings. There’s no fine-tuning your directions, either. Orientation is in ninety-degree increments, meaning that when you eventually stumble across the hole, you end up swirling into it via a right-angled vortex of tapped putts.
The first-person view turning sideways to take a shot is a neat touch. You don’t see the flight of your shots, but you don’t need to. They’re easy to find, and rarely deviate much from the expected path, with gusts of wind, the lay of the land, and your own ineptitude all hinted at instead. The biggest headache is remembering where you left the ball should you scout ahead to figure out where the green could be hiding.
Then, on Hole 17, it happens. Stranded in a maze — a literal maze — of fairways and a ziggurat of steep-sided rough, I give the chunky square ball a clonk and scamper off to find it. The five-minute search concludes when I return to where I took the shot, only to find that the ball has zipped away backwards. It’s Debdale Park all over again, but with no shaven-headed bouncers to see it.
Anyone dipping under two hundred shots for their round must be on a different plane from the rest of us mere mortals. My 248 strokes feel like a victory. A pyrrhic one, but a victory, nonetheless.
In many ways, DCGE2022 is just like real golf. It’s bewildering, disorientating, and an easy way to ruin a perfectly good walking sim.
