Mini Golf

Mini Golf is a 9-hole physics golf course: pick a hole from a thumbnail grid on the title screen, then drag away from the ball to aim and release to putt, navigating walls, sand traps, and moving obstacles toward the flag. It's one of the more ambitious small prototypes in this collection, and the foundations are genuinely solid.

We confirmed the core drag-to-putt gesture works correctly on both touch and mouse: grabbing the ball and dragging it launches a real Box2D-simulated shot that bounces convincingly off the wooden walls scattered around each hole, and the hole-select grid correctly loads a distinct, differently-laid-out course for each of the 9 tiles we checked. Unlike this collection's River Strike, it also correctly locks to landscape orientation on touch devices instead of leaving the canvas letterboxed.

What we found next was a real problem, not a one-off: after a single, entirely normal-strength putt, we timed exactly how long the ball took to slow down enough that the game would let us aim again (the game requires the ball's speed to drop below a fixed threshold before it treats the next tap-and-drag as a new shot). On a simulated phone, that took 30.5 real seconds. On a desktop mouse session with an equivalent putt, it took 22.4 seconds. Reading the ball's own physics state throughout confirmed why: above roughly 2 world-units/second, the ball barely loses any speed at all -- friction only really kicks in once it's already slowed most of the way down. In practice this means most shots leave you waiting the better part of half a minute, watching a ball roll gently across the green with no feedback that anything is happening, before the game will register your next putt. Several of our own touch-and-drag attempts during that window did nothing at all, which is exactly what a real player would experience -- it reads as broken input, not a slow ball.

That's a shame, because the rest of the package is good: nine genuinely different, sensibly designed holes, real physics rather than a canned rolling animation, and correct behavior on both control schemes. But a mini golf game where you regularly wait 20-30 seconds of dead time between shots isn't ready to recommend.

Verdict: Good bones -- real aim-and-putt physics, solid hole variety, correct orientation handling -- let down by a confirmed, measurable ball-friction bug that turns ordinary shots into a long, unresponsive-feeling wait. Worth revisiting once the deceleration curve is fixed.