I can’t stop playing Ribbit King. It’s simply too good.

Here’s something you may not know about me: I’m super into weird golf games. Kirby’s Dream Course is probably my favourite competitive multiplayer game of all time, a very specific type of freak shit that I’ve struggled to find elsewhere over the years. Although there are plenty of traditional golf games with an offbeat twist out there (Everybody’s Golf on the Vita and PS4, Mario Golf on the 3DS etc.) I feel like there’s a dearth of fucked up golf games that abstract the sport in weird and wonderful ways.

This is precisely why I decided to try Ribbit King, a golf-adjacent “sports” game originally released for the PS2 and Gamecube back in 2004. I’ve known of it for a while now (thanks to the YouTube channel Game Grumps who, coincidentally, also introduced me to Kirby’s Dream Course) but had failed to give it a try on account of physical PAL copies costing upwards of £300, which is fucking ridiculous.

Thankfully, an older boy taught me how to install retro games on my Steam Deck, so I decided to give it a whirl over the long easter weekend (my original copy is under my bed – or in the back of a big cupboard – officer, I promise). That was around a week ago, and since then, I have played Ribbit King every single day. The problem with Ribbit King is that it is exactly the type of weirdo golf game I’ve been craving, and as such has caused me to stop playing all of the other games I probably should be playing instead.

Here’s the pitch: Ribbit King revolves around the fictional game of Frolf, in which players launch frogs (via a tiny catapult operated by a hammer) towards a goal (a glowing pool of water with a big diamond hovering above it). In between the starting position and the goal are several obstacles designed to distract your frog and draw it away from your intended destination.

Flies will cause your frog to leap towards them, gobbling them up and jumping away from where they landed in the process. Phallic-shaped grass pushes them downhill. Whirlpools swallow them whole, spitting them out on the opposite end of the course. Hungry snakes hide in the undergrowth, ravaging your frog before tossing them to the wayside.

This is a bit of a tough one to explain, so please make sure you watch all eight hours of this YouTube longplay to fully appreciate this post. Thanks.

However! No matter how traumatic the experience may be for the frog, this chaos generates precious points. Linking multiple events together activates a combo, encouraging you to push your frog through horrible situations to multiply your potential score as much as possible.

The result is a golf game that – much like Kirby’s Dream Course before it – forces players to choose between the guaranteed points awarded by the goal (an amount that decreases with every stroke) and the bounty of points promised by a long string of mishaps inflicted on your amphibian pal. A small amount of skill is involved when setting up your frog’s trajectory, but success is mainly the result of chance. The game is janky enough to never feel truly knowable, making each snake-induced combo a moment of fist-pumping exhilaration. It’s pure risk-reward, and it feels fantastic.

As you can imagine, the best bit of Ribbit King is its multiplayer mode. Supporting up to four players, multiplayer is a predictably rowdy affair that generates unique sentences from your fellow players such as “Go for the fly you little shit!” and “I can’t believe you managed to drop your frog into the hole from that distance!”. It’s brilliant stuff, packed with all the tension and drama you’d expect from a sixth-generation sports game with a focus on couch co-op.

It helps that it’s drenched in a goofy mid-2000s aesthetic that is as cutesy as it is bizarre. It’s part Hello Kitty, part PaRappa the Rapper, but very much “we have both of those things at home, and they are located within a weird golf game involving frogs”. It’s all quite forgettable, which brings us quite neatly to its single-player mode, which is shit.

Although I originally grabbed the game to play with my good friend Zion, who stayed with us for a few nights over easter, I’ve spent the last few days playing it with my partner (and fellow Kirby’s Dream Course obsessive) Yolli. Sadly, after a few hours, we ran out of default courses and realised we’d have to power through the game’s single-player mode to unlock all of its remaining content.

This mode – which is little more than a stack of multiplayer matches that pit you against increasingly more difficult AI – features a bunch of miserable cutscenes that offer nothing to the wider experience. You play as a strange rabbit-like child named Scooter, who is sent on a quest by a King to save their planet from extinction. To do so, you have to win an intergalactic Frolf tournament, for which the prize is the exact precious mineral your planet requires to not explode, or something. Before each match the game plays an unskippable skit, introducing your opponent. They are all very bad and prevent you from playing more Frolf, which ultimately makes their inclusion unforgivable.

It doesn’t help that outside of the handful of default courses that are unlocked from the start, most of the levels you’re given by suffering through this miserable mode are boring at best and broken at worst. One level – set in space – features a round so awful you could arguably consider it to be the final boss of the game, given how aggressively it forces you to fight with the camera.

Still. Ignore all that, and you’ll find Ribbit King to be an excellent multiplayer golf game designed exclusively for weird-golf sickos (me). With chaotic combos at the heart of its mechanics, each match feels different enough to stop the game from feeling stale over time, something aided further thanks to a healthy selection of items that alter your frog’s abilities and behaviours. It’s wonderful stuff.

But I can’t help but feel saddened that Ribbit King – alongside the genre it boldly attempted to revitalise – has remained something of a rarity. Twenty years later, I’d be hard-pressed to uncover a golf game this goofy and unusual on modern platforms. Ribbit King developers Infinity and Jamsworks are seemingly long gone, and I’d be very surprised to see publisher Bandai Namco select this particular relic for a Switch rerelease, even if stranger things have happened over the years.

I get why these things never really gained mainstream popularity. Even regular golf is a bit of a hard sell, never mind a version involving frogs and tiny catapults. Am I missing something? Did we get an indie revival of dumb golf games at some point over the last decade, and it simply passed me by? Or is there something on the horizon, a mysterious title all but guaranteed to ruin my relationship through not-quite-golf-related arguments? Do let me know.

In the meantime, I suspect we’ll be sticking with Ribbit King for a little while longer, before inevitably returning to Kirby’s Dream Course. There’s just something about that little round bastard that makes for a timeless golf game, especially for deranged weirdos like me. The chaos, the drama. There’s got to be a market for this kind of stuff, right?

…right?

Any spelling mistakes, grammatical errors or badly phrased sentences in this post are all intentional. Cheers.