Fruit Ninja Dev's 'Normal Golf Game' Is Anything But Normal

Luke Muscat, the developer behind Fruit Ninja, quietly dropped a golf game on Steam on September 21 - and it's anything but normal. Normal Golf Game calls itself "normal," but the way you actually play it is delightfully weird.

Instead of a standard swing meter, you aim and adjust your club face with the keyboard, then swing using your mouse. To land the ball where you want, you also have to manage both swing power and arm extension at the same time. There's a tutorial covering all these fiddly mechanics, but according to players who've tried it, the tutorial itself is already a serious challenge.

And that's before the game starts throwing curveballs. Beyond regular fairways, Normal Golf Game asks you to pull off unconventional challenges like hitting signs. It's the kind of thing that keeps you on your toes rather than letting you settle into a relaxing round.

The story is even wilder. You play as someone kidnapped by a mad game designer and forced to golf. To escape the course, you first have to satisfy "Luke Muscat" - and yes, that's the developer himself, not a fictional stand-in.

The production side is just as strange. Reports say the developer included live-action footage because he didn't have enough assets. After launch, in Steam news posts and videos, he mentioned that the demo's popularity led to an enormous amount of hard work to get the full version finished.

It sounds like Muscat may be dealing with something close to burnout. One video is titled, roughly, "The game is finally out. I'm never doing this again." He said he can't keep repeating this kind of thing with every release, that he's trying to recover both physically and mentally, and that localization is one of the things he'd really like to do.

Normal Golf Game is out now on PC via Steam. It's priced at 1,350 yen, with a 20 percent discount bringing it to 1,080 yen until October 6. If you're curious about a golf game that refuses to be ordinary - and want to support a developer who clearly poured everything into it - this one's worth a look. Think you could handle that tutorial?