Desert Golfing

"Desert Golfing, of course, offers nothing to farm, nothing to grind, no economy at all to define your play. There are no options. There’s not even a menu to start over. The desert swallows everything but your ball, your angle, your momentum. It waits, unperturbed, for another swing. I suppose it’s worth noting that Destiny is a first-person, massively-multiplayer online shooter, and Desert Golfing is a 2D, two-tone single-player golfing simulator. And while Destiny cost half a billion dollars to develop, Desert Golfing appears to have cost, maybe, half a thousand. Yet the two games are both simple at heart. Both have sensational physics and feel, whether in their double-jumps and guns or golf balls and sand. And both aspire to that old Bungie gaming dictum about offering 30 seconds of fun, and then repeating it over and over. Except only Desert Golfing actually achieves this, and without 500 million dollars of fuss. Destiny and Desert Golfing are both designed to be played daily. So the question is: how will you spend your days? Plundering the same planets in hopes of finding a better gun? Punching the intergalactic clock until DLC comes along that finally makes it all worthwhile? Or hitting a ball into a hole? The desert is at least honest. There is no distraction, no mirage on the horizon, no promise of some future satisfaction. But there is space to breathe. You enjoy golfing for itself, the game says, or you enjoy nothing at all. The desert stretches on forever either way. And one day you’ll have to put your club down." - [url=https://tevisthompson.com/the-existential-art/]Tevis Thompson[/url]