I have been a major fan of developer Justin Smith of Captain Games ever since the arrival of “The Best Bear Driving Simulator in the App Store" Enviro-Bear 2010 ($1.99) on the iPhone more than a decade ago in July of 2009. What Enviro-Bear showed was that Smith was capable of creating games that were entirely silly on the surface but had a level of depth to their mechanics that kept players coming back over and over in an effort to master those mechanics, and indeed we’ve seen that with the various other releases from Captain Games over the years. One game where that sort of wasn’t the case though is with Desert Golfing ($1.99) that released on the App Store in 2014. This was a 2D side-view physics-based golfing game that was about as bare bones as they come. Each hole was just a single screen and you’d pull back on the screen to determine the angle and power of your shot and let loose. Get the ball in the hole, move onto the next hole, rinse and repeat.
What was strange about Desert Golfing though was that even though the mechanics themselves were dead simple and never evolved into anything more, there was this sort of hidden depth to the experience as a whole. I mean, first off, nobody really even knew if the game had an end or not. People would play through thousands and thousands of holes and the game just kept on going. One time in March of 2016 a player thought they made it to the “end" by way of the game generat...