A Little Golf Journey is a surprising delight. Not only does it control well, but it has beautifully designed environments, a varied and lengthy soundtrack, and a heartwarming story that makes it hard to put down. Easily one of the best golfing games of the year, A Little Golf Journey is the perfect way to kick back and relax.
Players begin their journey at the golf course, learning how to arc the ball, use power-shots, focus, and flip the camera to increase each swing's precision. Over time, the golf course begins to open into different biomes such as lakes, forests, and Japanese gardens, each one rich with color and sporting a unique layout that always feels fresh. With each new biome comes a slight upward difficulty curve, one that manages to closely follow the player's progression and never creates a scenario where getting par feels impossible or unfair.
A Little Golf Journey embraces the strengths that come from simple controls to create some truly unique ways to get a perfect score. One example is that the arc that shows the ball's trajectory will sway unless players manually focus for a few seconds. This swaying will eventually cause the arch to extend past its landing area and create a brief opportunity to send the ball to otherwise unreachable areas. While there are many ways to approach a level, A Little Golf Journey seems to encourage maneuvers like this as successfully using tricks tends to always let the player get to par on their last possible shot.
Traveling between stages will look familiar to players that enjoy 2D Super Mario games like Super Mario Bros. 3, in that there are specifically outlined paths in the overworld that lead to holes to jump into, as well as secrets. It's easy to identify what stages will have secrets, as there will usually be a visual indicator that's right nearby but slightly off the main path. Secrets manifest either as translucent cubes to run into or an occasional environmental trigger which will begin a challenge that subsequently opens the over-world's secret path when completed. The secret stages play out much like their regular counterparts, but completing them will make Blue Things pop up on some surrounding stages.
These collectables are really the only negative part of A Little Golf Journey's experience. Whenever a stage is completed, players will get stars, the highest number coming from par and gradually decreasing afterwards from there. In order transition from one biome to the next, players will either need a certain number of stars or amount of Blue Things to proceed. This generally isn't a problem, as stages are infinitely replayable and secrets are easy to find, but it does add a bit of a grind in the game's third act.
The most surprising part of the experience was becoming engrossed in a story that built without being noticed. The game opens with a letter that originally seems to just be a stand-in for the developer to welcome players to golf, but over time it transitions into something more personal and reflective. What was once a series of formal letters becomes something beautiful, a sincere back and forth between X and Y, the player and the writer. A Little Golf Journey is a game full of surprises and a gameplay loop that never gets old, and comes highly recommended.
A Little Golf Journey is out now on Nintendo Switch and PC via Steam. Screen Rant was provided with a Nintendo Switch download code for the purpose of this review.