Golfaria

I think no game grew on me more over the course of my playing it than Golfaria. When I first played Golfaria, I really didn’t like it. I played it more, and realized I kiiind of hated it? It was in D tier in my first tier list. But the entire time I was playing it, I was like “there’s something I’d love in here, something extremely fun and creative, it’s just REALLY hard to get to that point”. But when you FINALLY do, yeah. Yeah it’s fun and creative.

Golfaria

Golfaria is a top down Metroidvania-esque game, though I’d honestly liken it more to Zelda than to Metroid. It’s an action adventure game, where you play as a golf ball, awakening deep in the earth after who knows how long, with no memories, that you know of. You enter the world of Fairway, a beautiful realm, filled with sentient golf balls, horrible bugs called “Bogies”, birdies and eagles, and robo-birds that watch your every move and give you lore when you destroy them. What’s your goal? You don’t know. Just… go exploring.

The only problem is that exploring is awful, and is not fun to do, at all, when you first start. The game is a top down golf game, think something like Kirby’s Dream Course though not quite that advanced. You can only hit the ball forward, no smacking it up into the air, unless you’re in sand or a hole. You have only a certain number of strikes to get the ball to where you want to go, and again, it’s the start of the game. You don’t know where you want to go, yet. With only 20 strokes you need to go exploring. Those strokes can be improved by finding golf clubs, though good luck finding those, and healed by hitting birds, killing bogies, and finding safe zone flags, but good luck finding those, too. The game DOES kind of lead you in the right direction for a good upgrade to help make things easier, but it still took more percise suggestions to get there for me.

Golfaria

Once you get past that hurdle though, and go through the first few dungeony areas with a few more clubs to increase your health, the game opens up in a way that’s really nice. The game controls really roughly at first, and you fly all over the god damn place, but once you get the brakes, holy shit it controls so much better. I do like the aesthetics and graphical design, but holy fuck it’s hard to tell which way slopes go sometimes, so you go all over which way. You can figure it out by studying the map with A, which shows you the direction of slopes, but it took me a bit to learn that.

In conclusion, Golfaria is a land of contrasts. As I knew, there’s a lot of fun to be had here, and I really did enjoy exploring it all to find 100% of the items. But it takes a bit to get there. Just be patient, don’t be like me.

7/10