There has been a couple of games that have been released recently that have taken the mantle of being unrealistic sports games.
These aren’t sports simulators, they are games that use a sport that is familiar to most people and make a new kind of game that does something unique while still having a basis in the original source material.
The first title that comes to mind is Golf Story for the Switch. Golf Story is a role-playing adventure game that uses some elements of golf in its adventure game gameplay. The character hits a ball at elements or holes of the world map to complete objectives and open up more of the world. This isn’t too far from traditional RPG story-telling progression.
The next title that comes to mind is Adult Swim’s Pool Panic that was announced this past week at GDC. Pool Panic is touted as “The world’s least realistic pool simulator game” by its developers. The game has the player using pool elements to complete single player or multiplayer levels. The game looks like a puzzle game with pool elements. I think Pool Panic looks amazing and I can’t wait to play the hell out of it. Adult Swim humor with a fun pool style game.
I’m sure there are others that I could add to this article but I can’t think of any at the moment.
I would like to see more developers utilize sports in a non-traditional way like these two games above. In the same way that Zach Gage, turned the solitaire rules and chess rules on their heads and made some interesting variations on those games.
It seems like Switch is a hotbed for indie game development. It might have something to due with the fact that sales are strong and the business model of the eShop isn’t based on free games, unlike the Google Play Store and the Apple App Store. I hope that these games do well for themselves and it encouages developers to do some more exploration in the area.