Summary
- Release Year: 2018
- Genres: Indie, Simulator
- Platforms: PC (Microsoft Windows)
Simple Golfing
Developer: Pixel Perfect Golf Games
Publisher: Pixel Perfect Golf Games
Platforms: PC (Steam), Nintendo Switch, iOS, Android
Price: $4.99 (Steam), $3.99 (mobile), $5.99 (Switch)
Release: Out now
The elevator pitch for Simple Golfing is right there in the title: this is golf stripped to its studs—no caddies, no commentary team, no 30-page spreadsheet of backspin coefficients. You get a ball, a hole, and a drag-back arrow that looks like it was borrowed from a mini-golf Flash game circa 2004. Five bucks, 100 holes, done. And yet, three nights after I bought it I looked up to discover I’d missed dinner, my Steam Deck’s battery was blinking red, and I was muttering “just one more course” like a man possessed. Simple Golfing may not have the licensing budget of EA’s PGA Tour or the bar-setting physics of HB Studios’ The Golf Club, but it understands something those games occasionally forget: immediacy is king. When I can finish an 18-hole circuit in the time it takes a triple-A title to load its shader cache, you’ve got my attention.
Gameplay: One-thumb, infinite retries
Controls are the dictionary definition of pick-up-and-play. You touch/click the ball, pull back in the opposite direction you want to shoot, watch a power meter bloom outward, release. That’s it. No spin dial, no club selection, no wind-read overlay. The only wrinkle is that terrain matters—ball rolls realistically on downhill slopes, gets hung up in bunkers, and accelerates on ice patches later in the campaign. Early holes are straight 100-meter chips; by world three you’re banking shots off walls, threading narrow castle corridors, or using TNT crates to blast rock piles out of the way. It’s basically Angry Birds’ precision cousin: easy to execute, tough to master. Par is set generously (most holes are par 3 or 4), but the three-star scoring—based on strokes under par—pushes perfectionists to hunt birdies and eagles. Restarting a hole is instant, no load, so the “just one more try” loop is kryptonite for compulsive types. My only gripe is that the mobile versions omit local multiplayer; the Switch port allows up to four players hot-seat, which turns the game into a fantastic couch-competitive diversion.
Course design: Micro-golf at its meanest
There are 100 holes broken into ten themed blocks—Grassland, Desert, Snow, Volcano, Castle, Space, etc.—and each theme introduces exactly one mechanic. Desert adds quicksand that grabs your ball mid-roll; Volcano has lava rocks that bounce you into oblivion; Space shrinks the gravity so every putt turns into a lunar hop. The designers wring every drop of cruelty out of those mechanics. One later hole asks you to land on a two-square-meter island surrounded by lava, then ricochet off a wall into a pipe that deposits you on a cliff’s edge, at which point you must snipe the flag 60 yards away with a narrow arch. I screamed at my Switch so loudly the dog left the room. And yet the holes are never random; once you decipher the geometric trick—usually after half a dozen failures—you feel like a genius. It’s the same serotonin hit you got from the best Mario Golf or Desert Golfing, distilled into bite-size servings.
Progression and unlocks: Cosmetic, not pay-to-win
Beating a world unlocks a palette swap for your ball (my favorite: the snow-world “ice cube” that clinks like glass) and a new trail effect. That’s it. No stats on a driver, no loot boxes, no battle pass. The Android/iOS versions do sell a $1.99 “premium” DLC that removes ads and adds cloud save; the Steam and Switch versions are ad-free out of the gate. I finished every hole on PC without spending another cent, and I never felt throttled. If you’re allergic to micro-transactions, buy on console or PC; if you want the ultimate toilet-time time-killer, mobile is still perfectly serviceable.
Graphics and audio: Charming, not chart-topping
Visuals sit somewhere between 8-bit and 16-bit: flat-shaded polygons, a single parallax background layer, and a color palette that changes per biome. It’s not pushing Unreal Engine 5 to its limits, but the readability is perfect—you can always tell slope grade at a glance, which is more important than volumetric grass. The soundtrack is a mellow chiptune loop that never overstays its welcome; I usually turn off game music to listen to podcasts, but here I kept it on. Sound effects are hilariously tactile: the ball makes a satisfying “clack” on drives, a soft “plop” in water, and a Wilhelm-scream-ish yelp when you sink a hole-in-one. It’s silly, but it sells the fantasy.
Performance: 60 fps even on a potato
I tested on four devices: a Ryzen 9 5900X/RTX 3080 desktop (2K 165 Hz monitor), a Steam Deck OLED, an iPhone 13 Mini, and a launch-model Switch. Every one of them held 60 fps without drops. Battery burn on Steam Deck: roughly 9 percent per 18-hole session at 50 percent brightness—phenomenal for an OLED model. Load times are sub-second on all platforms. The mobile versions are 120 MB; Switch is 280 MB because of higher-res textures. You could probably install this on a smart fridge.
Replay value: More than you’d expect
After credits roll (a cute 20-second animation of your ball turning into a star and soaring into a pixelated sky), you unlock “Daily Hole,” a single procedurally generated course seeded by the date, and “Ironman Mode,” where you must play all 100 holes in sequence without a restart. I thought I’d never touch it again; instead I spent another three evenings trying to break par on the daily, comparing my stroke count against a global leaderboard that peaks at around 3,000 players. It’s no Rocket League, but for the price of a coffee the competitive tail is longer than it has any right to be. The Switch version also adds local speedrun timers, so you can race friends in real time—perfect for barcades or dorm lounges.
Accessibility: Light but present
You can remap the single input (drag/confirm), enable a high-contrast color mode for color-blind users, and toggle “relaxed mode,” which removes par limits and lets you skip any hole. There’s no assist for motor impairments beyond the already-minimal input, but because you can play one-handed on a phone, it’s more accessible than most motion-intensive golf games.
Comparison to the competition
Let’s get the obvious out of the way: if you want photoreal courses, branded clubs, or online tournaments with 100-player lobbies, buy PGA Tour 2K23 or EA’s upcoming revival. If you want a zen-like endless sandbox, Desert Golfing still rules. But Simple Golfing occupies a sweet spot: cheaper than either, more structure than Desert, and faster than everything else. I can finish an entire world in eight minutes, which makes it the perfect palate cleanser between Overwatch 2 ranked queues. It’s also the rare mobile game that doesn’t nag you for cash every third hole.
Verdict: A five-star bargain at five bucks
Simple Golfing doesn’t revolutionize the genre, but it does for golf what Super Meat Boy did for platformers: shrink it, tighten it, and make it irresistibly repeatable. The controls are instant, the course design is sneakily devious, and the whole package respects your time and wallet. If you’ve ever lost an hour to Wordle or Threes, this will scratch the same itch—only here you get the extra dopamine spike of sinking a hole-in-one on a pixelated par-4 suspended over lava. Grab it on whatever platform you use the most; just don’t blame me when you miss bedtime.
Review Score
6.5/10
Art
Cover Art
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