Cursed to Golf

Most roguelikes hand the player a weapon and a dungeon. Cursed to Golf, developed by Chuhai Labs and released August 18, 2022, hands them a golf club and Golf Purgatory — a side-scrolling underworld built from dungeon-like holes where every shot spent is a resource that can end the run. The game coined its own subgenre label, “golflike,” and the claim holds up: nothing else in the roguelike space structures failure and resource management around a par count.

The premise is that a lightning strike kills a golfer mid-tournament swing, and escape from Purgatory requires completing 18 holes arranged across four biomes. Holes are drawn from a pool of over 70 and ordered randomly, so no two runs play the same course. Staying alive means reaching the hole before exhausting the allotted shot count; running out sends the player back to the start of the current course. Scattered through each hole are gold and silver Shot Idols that restore shots when struck, making route-reading — aided by the Birdie-Eye full-course preview — as important as raw shot execution.

Hazards go well beyond turf conditions. High-powered fans, spike fields, TNT boxes, and teleporters fill the holes, and the side-scrolling perspective means the ball travels through space that behaves more like a platformer level than a fairway. The main tool for navigating this is a deck of Ace Cards, a set of more than 20 power-ups including Scattershot, U-Turn, Rocketball, and Mulligans. Cards are the run’s variable engine: which ones appear and when shapes every approach. Ghostly Legendary Caddies govern individual courses and provide mechanical tutoring alongside the story of redemption.

Chuhai Labs supported the game actively after launch. The initial weeks saw several bug-fix patches and the addition of Steam community items. In October 2022 the Purgatory Remix update arrived alongside seasonal cosmetic outfits. The game’s first anniversary in August 2023 was acknowledged publicly, and that October brought the Golf Pin Update, the most substantial named content drop visible in the release record. A significant discount appeared in mid-2024 alongside a further bug-fix patch.

For players familiar with Spelunky’s relationship between resource conservation and run survival, Cursed to Golf applies the same pressure through shot economy rather than health, wrapping it in a sport that no one expected to carry this kind of tension.