Interview: Cursed to Golf

Interview: Cursed to Golf

A conversation with Liam Edwards, designer of the 2023 indie golf adventure.

Released as a Limited Run standard edition title three years ago, Chuhai Labs’ Cursed to Golf still stands out as one of the most inventive and original takes on video game golf that we’ve ever seen. A side-scrolling action game featuring course randomization and all sorts of strange power-ups, Cursed to Golf tells the tale of a person who must win his way out of purgatory by hitting the links. In this never-before-published interview with lead designer Liam Edwards, we learn more about the personal history behind the game, what it owes to Metroid, whether or not it really counts as a roguelike, and the appeal of physical releases.

Liam Edwards:

I remember [games journalist] Brian Ashcraft doing his tattoo and his whiskey books. I would go into the airport and I'd be like, “Oh, there's Brian's book.” It must be an amazing feeling. I worked on Grand Theft Auto V a long time ago, but with that kind of thing, it’s so big that it doesn't feel like yours. I've never had physical versions of anything I created [before Cursed to Golf], so it’s the first time. It's so cool.

Limited Run Games:

Yeah, when you put a book or something in print, it's going to be there forever. Even if it shows up in a Goodwill or used bookstore or something, that means it's still out there.

LE:

I got interviewed for EDGE, and it was amazing, because I grew up reading EDGE and gamesTM. To have a physical thing where, I don't know, 10,000 people will see it, whatever, where I've talked about making the games. I remember my mom picking up the EDGE magazine and she's like, “I just can't believe it.”

Unfortunately. I've come along at a time when it is hard to get those physical things. It’s really strange to me, because I've never really made things where people care so much. But with Cursed to Golf, it's the first time—I’m surprised, but I'll take it. Oh, we get to do physicals? People want this? This is so cool.

LRG:

And the game itself is really cool, too. Golf is such a natural fit for video games, but this is a very different take on it.

LE:

Yeah, I think it is weird, because if people knew how I grew up, they would be like, “Oh, of course it’s a golf game.” I grew up playing golf, and I was pretty good at it. I used to play in tournaments a lot. But it was really stressful, and I didn't like it. I just wanted to be at home like playing Zelda or something. I had a bad relationship with golf... I just didn't enjoy it. So making a game that’s about being stuck in a loop where you have to keep playing golf until you got so good that you'd be able to escape made sense to me.

But it's actually the inverse. I was bored during COVID, and I was thinking, “Why hasn’t anybody...?” I listen to the Eggplant podcast sometimes, and of course they talk a lot about roguelikes, and I was thinking, “Why has nobody made a physics roguelike?” The answer is that would be a really dumb idea! You've got RNG, and then you have physics, which is natural RNG. Those two things are very hard.

What I was thinking was essentially meant to be a physics roguelike that had Metroid dungeons, and you'd move via physics. I was hitting this object around in a Metroid dungeon, and I was like, “This is kind of like golf....” And with a swing meter and a power meter, just basically taking from Neo Turf Masters or something. I was like, “Oh, this is golf.” And then it just spiraled into what it is now.

And golf is, as you said, it's inherently something that everyone kind of understands. It’s weirdly good for video games because you can dissect it. Need power-ups? OK, you can have a Mulligan for a do-over. I can make the ball become anything I want it to be... an ice ball, a fire ball, a thunder ball. It’s like, oh, this is easy. It's writing itself. I'm not that smart. It's just the game is opening all these opportunities for me to just have fun and play with. And I think that was where it went. And I'm surprised that nobody's done anything like it before. I'm sure there have been things like it, but I think people watch it and they're like, ”That's so strange, but I understand it. I can see what the player is doing in the clip.”

LRG:

I don't know that I've ever seen a side scroller golf game before.

LE:

I think there was a Wario Land mini game. There's a bit where you can play a mini game of golf in that. And that’s the only time I've ever seen a side-scrolling take on golf. It's still just golf. You’ve got a meter and you've got trajectory. Even if you were in a 3D space or a 2D game, it's still like this, but it goes at a sort of relative angle in 2D.

LRG:

It's funny because the early days of the golf genre developers worked so hard to create realistic 3D spaces and working within the limitations of old systems, where obviously you couldn't do that, so they started applying labels and icons to surfaces to indicate slopes and wind direction and stuff. And some of those golf sims from the 16-bit era were incredible. Pushing 16-bit hardware to create polygonal 3D spaces, just being able to shift views and everything. And you've just thrown all of that away. 

LE:

Too much work! I think there was just a weird melting pot of things that kind of came together. And one of them is the idea that every hole was meant to look a bit like a Metroid level. And I was thinking about backtracking and stuff. Imagine you had to go through 18 different holes and you had to backtrack to certain holes and to get things to allow you to progress in other holes. And then the layouts worked, because they were multi-path. At that point it’s like, well, stick some hazards in this path and then give the player the option to either rely on their skill, which is the golf part, or to be able to use these power-ups to help them. And then I realized that you don't just want golf to be separate from the powers. What you want to do then is combine both of them.

So we have a lot of cards that allow you to manipulate the ball, but it requires skill, because golf is still a game of skill. And then it just became this nice merger of both of those things, and it worked quite nicely. I think there's something inherently readable about 2D as well. When you look at side-scrolling, it's left to right to left, and you just get it. And that works very nicely in our favor with golf.

In the new Mario Golf, they have the speed run mode or whatever it is. And it just doesn't make sense to me, because golf courses are so big. You have such a large space that you have to get to grips with in this game. They have them running together and bumping into each other and stuff, but you could just run off in the other direction and nobody can touch you. I think that with golf, it's not that golf is difficult to understand, but it's hard to read all the information like the distance or the hazards or something that you can’t see. But when you break that down and you make something simple in 2D that’s like, OK, here's a map where you go left right up and down. So you think, “OK, hit shot to the right, hit shot to the left.” And that makes it a lot easier for people to just jump in and play, which I think is really important.

LRG:

Yeah, the aiming mechanic reminds me of Worms or something.

LE:

Yeah, we do get that a lot. People always like, “That reminds me of Worms!” That’s not on purpose, but it works.

LRG:

Yeah, I mean it's a totally different kind of game. Maybe you could in the DLC create exploding golf balls that will deform the terrain. 

LE:

Actually, we did want that! Our whole thing was to make power-ups that break the game, because that's where the fun is. You could just golf through the normal flow and it's just a golf game. But what if you could add things that allow you to go through the terrain and stuff? So we have a drill ball. You have a ball called the phase ball that you can turn the collision off. It literally clips through the world and you can turn it back on. But one of the original ideas was to make a bomb ball that you would be able to hit and deform the terrain. Unfortunately, that requires a lot of hard work, and we didn't have time to be able to make it deform the terrain since it’s all made of blocks. It is just a game made of square blocks. It was kind of hard to think about how that should work.

But that's the thing. You can think of an infinite amount of different ways to approach a golf game, because you just start with the ball. Then you're like, “OK, what if it's a spider ball and it crawls on the wall?” It was so cool to be able to just experiment as much as we wanted. We had to almost cap ourselves at a point. We had so many different ideas and we're like, “OK, well we could really break the game or we could try to balance it.” And I think where we got to works quite nicely. The power-ups are really powerful, but they still require skill for you to use them. So there's this nice progressive curve towards that kind of real golf.

LRG:

Yeah. So how many holes do you have in total? Is it just the 18?

LE:

No, so the way the game works. This has been a sort of point... of not contention, but definitely throughout development. People maybe get this wrong. It's not randomly generated, because a roguelike is quite difficult. It just has some elements.

LRG:

I didn't realize it was procedurally generated.

LE:

It's not. That's the thing. It’s not procedurally generated, because we experimented with that. We realized that you never can randomly generate something that gives what the player wants out of golf, which is long shots or tight shots that give you these things and trying to get to a point where the player is having fun hitting the shots, not just, “I have to do this again and it’s really difficult.” So every hole is handcrafted, but of course just 18 holes is very boring and runs out of steam very quickly. So we actually hand-designed over 70 levels across all of the different areas.

What the game does is something we call random ordering. Every hole has a difficulty ranking. On an 18-hold course, the first hole is the easiest and then the final hole, the 18th hole, is the most difficult. So every hole that we design has a ranking that sort of matches whether it's very easy, normal, or hard. And then the way the biomes are structured is that each hole that makes up those biomes has a ranking. The game roulettes it. So if you’re in a very easy space, it roulettes all of the very easy holes and says, OK, for this round, you get this one. In the story, we explain that it's like a shifting labyrinth, and the guy keeps moving these holes around. So the replayability is really high, but also the player then has more fun trying to figure these things out. You do have the same holes come up sometimes, but generally, yeah, there's a lot of replayability.