Golf on Mars
Golf on Mars, The successor to Desert Golfing, from Captain Games.
Released in July 2020, Golf on Mars is the successor to Desert Golfing, a charmingly simple golf game released in 2014. In Golf on Mars, users play through a terraformed Mars with über simple drag-and-release controls for selecting the angle and power behind each swing.
Apart from being super chill and dead simple to play, Golf on Mars' claim to fame is that it offers a virtually unlimited (~25,770,000,000, or twenty-five billion, seven hundred and seventy thousand) number of holes in the game. Here's an example from the developer to help frame just how infinite this game is:
"If you were a paleolithic hunter-gatherer gazing up at the Red planet one night during your traversal of the ice bridge connecting Russia to Alaska at the last glacial maximum 24515 years ago and a time traveler brought an iPhone for you and your tribe to ritually play a hole of Golf On Mars every 30 seconds, it would take until the present day to complete all the holes."
So yeah, unlimited! I'm pretty sure the developer would be happy to refund you if you finished the game and felt like you didn't get your money's worth.
But that's all there is to say. It's a minimalist 2D game of golf that you can play for as little or as long as you want to play a round of golf, with the app continuing from the hole you left off with each time. Thinking back, my longest game in Desert Golfing must've gotten into the high triple-digits before I needed to reset my device or got a new phone (I can't recall which it was).
I do wish Golf on Mars included iCloud sync, so when it came to getting a new device or doing a fresh iOS install, I could restore the game & pick up from where I last left off. But maybe that's not the point of a game like this, like the Buddhist practice of destroying a mandala after its creation, with this game serving to remind us that 'nothing is permanent.' Perhaps it's that, or maybe I'm just reading WAY too much into it. Either way, the experience is a blast!
External Links
App Store: Golf on Mars
Developer Website: Captain Games
Golf on Mars is also available on macOS, Windows, and on Android through the Google Play store.
