Vertiginous Golf

Vertiginous Golf is a crazy golf game, with the courses having a steampunk aesthetic and located in the clouds. The courses often have ramps, moving platforms, fans, spinners, conveyor belts and more. The more complicated courses; multileveled with branching paths, which makes it hard to orientate yourself. There are some “free shot” holes which give you a slight shortcut and don’t count as a shot. On some levels you are allowed to rewind your shots, or modify the direction mid-flight. You only use a Putter, or Wedge.

The game must be one of the worst UI designs I have experienced. You begin playing in a first-person view on a street, often with the camera pointing straight up. Once you reposition the camera, you can either enter the building ahead of you, or can go to the shop next door. In the first building, you need to ignore the first terminal and move to the end. If you are too close to the first terminal it will automatically open the menu to create new courses. If you reach the end of the building, a set of monitors pop up. You can then access the right-hand monitor, go through a few menus to select the course, then interact with the middle monitor to “play” but this still doesn’t take you to the game. You then need to move to the seat next to you and watch the animation of your character getting his brain fried to take you to the VR world in the clouds.

When you complete a course you are placed in front of the monitors again, then have to go through this process again. It’s not clear which courses you have attempted, or what your score was either.

When you earn money on the courses, you can spend money on new clothes to change your appearance. It’s worthless though because you only see your character in that animation sequence. On the courses, you only see your club accompanied by a hummingbird.

When the course begins, the camera pans around the course. You can press a key to retrigger the sequence any time. You can press another key to go control your bird in a first-person view; so you can look around the course but are limited by walls and such - so it feels clunky.

When I chose the first option on the menu, I felt the courses got quite crazy quickly and could do with some more courses like the initial ones that are quite close to the real mini-golf. There were actually more of these courses in another menu option. I assume these were developed at a later time, but I felt it would have made sense to add them in to have a smoother difficulty curve.

There’s a story mode, but you just play the original courses with added checkpoint areas which you must hit to trigger the dialogue.

I thought the gameplay was entertaining enough, and got around 4.5 hours out of it. If you create your own courses, play the community courses, or replay the courses, then you can get more hours out of the game.