Loft Links

How to play

Golf, three dimensions, five clubs. Ninety seconds of reading.

1. Aim, load, swing. Three separate things, in that order. Drag anywhere on the course to turn: sideways swings the aim and the camera with it, all the way round, and up and down raises and drops the camera so you can look along the shot or down onto it. Nothing you do out there plays a stroke. Then set the power on the meter at the bottom — press anywhere along it to load that much, then hold the handle and drag to trim, or nudge it with ↑↓ — and the arrow on the ground grows as it winds on, turning red when there is nothing left to give. The meter runs past a full swing, into the hatched stretch at the end: see below for what that costs. Swing plays the shot, and so does space. Press it with the meter still empty and there is nothing to play, so it says so — the meter flashes rather than the button sitting there dead. The ‹ and › buttons beside it nudge the aim a hair, for the putts that need it, and hold them down to keep nudging.
2. Stand where you like. Aiming and looking are two different things. The View dial along the top of the course walks you round the ball without touching the shot: slide the knob right to stand to the right of the line, left to stand to the left, either end to get in front of the ball and look back down it. The shot still turns the camera with it when you drag the course, so a side-on angle stays side-on while you aim. The ⌖ in the middle of the dial puts you straight back behind the ball — and so does a new hole, so nothing you left at an angle follows you onto the next one. , and . walk round a step at a time, and so do the ↺ and ↻ buttons at either end — held down they keep walking, which beats eleven taps to get round the far side. 0 straightens up.
3. Pick a club. Click the bag in the bottom corner: the clubs come out, line up and turn slowly so you can look at them, and the one under your pointer is explained above. Click a head to take it, or swipe across the bag to step to the next one without opening it. The heads are set at their real lofts, so the wedge lying right back is the one that goes up. Keys 1–5 take a club directly, C steps to the next one, and B opens the bag. The putter rolls flat and stops where you tell it, the driver is the reach club, the 7 iron is the long one that carries rather than runs, the pitch goes up steep and stops where it lands, and the wedge is the lob — straight up over water, sand and trees. Each one has its own ceiling on power, so a full swing means something different in every hand.
4. The hole introduces itself. Every new hole opens with a flyover: it starts over the green looking back at the flag, sweeps down the course and lands exactly where you play from, behind the ball. It is a look at the shape of the thing before you have to think about the shot — where the green is, what is between you and it, and which way round the trouble goes. Press anything at all to cut it short and get straight to the tee, and if you would rather never see it, the 🎬 Flyover chip behind ☰ turns it off for good. Restarting a hole does not replay it.
5. Read the hole first. V walks between three cameras: behind the ball, side on — square across the shot, which is the only place you can see how high a lofted one is going and whether it clears what is in the way — and overview, the whole hole from above, which lifts the fog on a misty one so it is still worth looking at. Scroll or pinch to zoom, and L — or the padlock at the left of the View dial — holds the camera still so aiming stops turning it, which is what makes the overview a map you can aim from rather than one that spins as you do. The cone in front of the ball is where the shot is headed — real physics, not a guess, so it tells you the truth about rails and ramps. How wide it opens is how little the game is promising: inside a full swing it is a narrow wedge and the ball goes exactly down it, and past one it flares out and reddens by as much as the shot might miss by. Aim it at a rail and it carries on through the bounce, fainter, on the way it comes off. It also stops — it fades out a good way short of the horizon rather than running the length of the hole, and the arrowhead only appears when the ball comes down inside what has been drawn.
6. Past a full swing. The meter does not stop at 100%. The last stretch of it — hatched, past the white line — is overdraw: real extra power, up to 130% of the club in hand and a bonus on top of that for striking it well, which is the only way to get more out of a club than it has. The bonus is almost all at the very end: half way up the overdraw is worth a few percent, the top of it a good deal more. What it costs is the promise. Anything at or under a full swing leaves on exactly the line the cone points down, every time.
7. The swing gate. Past a full swing, Swing no longer plays the shot — it starts one. A marker runs along the meter you just loaded, and pressing space or Strike again is where the club meets the ball. Hit the green zone, which sits on the white full-swing line, and you keep everything: all of the overdraw, the bonus, and the exact line the cone was pointing down. Miss it and the shot goes the way you missed — early pulls, late pushes — and it keeps bending that way in the air, which is why a bad one finishes so much further off than it left. The further past 100% you wound it, the smaller the zone and the faster the marker: at the very top it is a sixteenth of a second. There are four gates and they rotate, so you meet all of them: strike on the line; catch it coming back off the top; press at the top and then strike; and one where the marker goes dark for the run in and you have to strike on rhythm. Nothing forces you into any of it — stay inside a full swing and there is no gate at all.
8. Read the flag. The pin stands in the cup, and it is the only thing on the course telling you what the wind is doing: the flag streams away downwind, snaps in a gust, and hangs limp when the air goes still. The wind does not push the ball — a hole plays the same in a squall as it does at noon — but every hole has a sky of its own, and it is the same sky every time you come back to it. W changes it if you would rather see the hole in something else.
9. The sound starts off. Nothing plays until you ask for it — M, or the speaker behind ☰. What you get is a lounge trio playing quietly under the round, along with the weather; J keeps the weather and sends the band home. Tab away and all of it stops until you come back.
10. Mind the water. A splash or a fall off the edge costs one stroke and you play again from where you hit. Sand is heavy going, boards are quick, and a tilted green breaks the ball downhill the whole way.

←→ aim · ↑↓ power · space swing · shift fine control · ,. view round the ball · L lock it · 0 straighten · V seat · F fullscreen · R restart hole · M sound · J music · O fancy water · P frame rate

Records are kept per course — tap a plan to start on that hole.

Scorecard