REVIEW : Golf Club Wasteland (PC)
The Earth is in ruins. Humans have made it completely unlivable and moved en masse to a new planet, Mars, under the supervision of a multinational not too casually called Tesla. Over the years, the super-rich of the red planet has begun to return to the wreckage of their old world to … play golf. Already the image of someone fighting boredom by throwing balls into the hole on the corpse of his house, where billions of people have died, has something disturbing, but, as we will see in the review of Golf Club Wasteland, it is not content to offer a cynicism of a manner and manages to do much more: tell the collapse of humanity.
Game mechanics
The game mechanics of Golf Club Wasteland are very simple and follow those of many similar titles (thought of Golf on Mars, to name): the protagonist, a pot-bellied astronaut of whom we initially know nothing, must hit the ball with his golf club, making a hole in the least number of shots possible. The action is framed horizontally, with the hole being shown by an initial overview and then becoming freely observable. Of course, our nameless golfer will always find himself where the ball is, and, after each shot, he will fly with his jetpack to reach it. To shoot, hold down the left mouse button and drag it to decide the strength and direction of the shot. The stronger the shot, the more inaccuracy increases, represented by the flickering of the interface. That’s all. There are no clubs to change or other internal factors to consider, such as golfer characteristics.
Narrative side
Like a golf game, Golf Club Wasteland is not very successful. Indeed, it often becomes frustrating, yet at a certain point, it begins to exert an almost hypnotic charm on the player, who ends up getting carried away by his deep melancholy and by the narrative crescendo managed with great ability. The involvement is so great that continuing to play golf becomes an excuse to continue following the story. So let’s try to explain ourselves better.
The title of Demagog Studio combines three different narrative techniques. The first is the purely environmental one: we are playing golf on a completely ruined planet, where buildings and infrastructures, once the glory of our species, have become silent tombstones that act as a warning against the madness that has led those who have could afford it. From this point of view, the developers have done a great job to make the game world decadent and desolate, creating a very strong natural contrast with the activity we are doing (playing golf, in case you missed it). However, if they had limited themselves to this gimmick, they would have made the experience quite poor, holding back on that small cynicism we were talking about above.
Here comes the second narrative idea: the protagonist listens to a Martian radio all the time, called Radio Nostalgia From Mars, which chronicles the life of humans on the red planet. The radio broadcasts, which are made up of interviews, music, government announcements, live testimonies, memories of the Earth, and appeals to the population, make the atmosphere of the game even more impregnated, giving us the background of what happened and filling the paths of ghosts (metaphorically speaking), evoked by the voices of people millions of kilometres away. So let’s listen to the words of the survivors and imagine we are playing among what were their homes, their workplaces, the places where they went on vacation. We listen to the propaganda of the power that controls Mars, which tries to hide the problems that oppress the colonies behind grim rhetoric. We listen to the nostalgia of humans for a planet that no longer exists and on which they have left everything they held dear. Everyone has lost some affection; no one is excluded. And we play golf.
Here comes the third narrative technique, which, if we want, is also the one that leads to the most surprising result. During the holes, small events happen, linked to a mysterious and unidentified narrator, which initially the game does not seem to give much weight.
Gradually, however, these become more and more frequent and begin to reveal the identity of our character, making him evolve and giving him strong motivations. At the beginning of the game, it is inevitable to perceive it as a kind of embodiment of the cynicism of power. After all, who would not consider inhumane an individual who chooses to pay a lot of money to play a sport as well-heeled as golf on the spoils of his old world? Yet never, as in this case, are we faced with a smokescreen raised to distract us, which is thinned hole after hole, revealing in the clumsy avatar that we are controlling unexpected humanity.
Slowly the three narratives merge, with the environmental story and the radio broadcasts that go to compose his story, whose threads are re-tied after the end of the game, with the unlocking of a diary in which images and words finally explain who he is. the golfer and why he is there.
