It’s worth saying this from the off, Tiny Terry’s Turbo Trip (an alliterate pleasure) is only a few hours long and every single minute is filled with joy. This is one of those games that comes along and entertains in so many ways, from the oddball animation style to the simple pleasures of acting out mundane tasks in this sideways world.
We’ll get the premise of the game out of the way because it’s a very simple affair. You play as Terry, a young man who is failing school, and rather than attend summer school he wants to drive a car into space. The game starts with Terry in a job centre applying to be a taxi driver in order to get his hands on a car. Once this is achieved, your goal is to collect enough turbo junk to upgrade the car’s speed to reach space.
It’s ludicrous, a bit bonkers, and often delightfully surreal. Terry and the folk around town are formed of masses of colour, a bit blobby and out of proportion. They talk by honking and squeaking which is translated into speech bubbles, delivering deadpan and often hilarious pieces of dialogue. The whole game feels like a bizarre fever dream of colour and motion, each character and cast member talking like a walking book of witty jokes.
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You’ll spend much of your time pootling around the town and its surrounding wilderness looking for tasks to complete, or chatting with NPCs. One such NPC, for example, is teaching yoga to a group of sleepy patrons. You join in by moving Terry into certain positions and saying ‘ohm’ at the right moments and your reward is some turbo junk for your car’s engine upgrade. This is often your reward and it simply helps your car get that bit faster.
Shops litter the map, some sell cute frog-like pets, others sell hats that do nothing except improve your style, and then there’s the junk shop that seels tools. A shovel is handy for digging up piles of dirt to uncover cash that is then spent in said shops, while weapons can be used to destroy objects, also doling out cash.
Really, your only job is to explore and react to the world around you. You dig where you can, use a glider to reach longer distances and wander around stealing cars or breaking things. It’s a bit like being dropped into the open-world of an RPG, but on a much simpler scale. Technically you could focus on just collecting junk and finish the game in under 30 minutes, but you’ll be distracted often by an odd NPC or a want to reach higher platforms in an attempt to find everything you can.
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For such a short game, I don’t want to reveal more. Pretty much every great moment in this 3D platformer comes from a silly conversation or working out how to interact with something and to explain these or point them out robs them of their comedic timing or the ‘ah-ha’ moment.
All I can really say about Tiny Terry’s Turbo Trip is that for the few hours I spent with it nothing else mattered. I wandered around sometimes focusing on exploration, sometimes switching up and concentrating on furthering the upgrade of the taxi. I chuckled a lot, I explored because I wanted to see and collect as much as possible, and it felt like a nice detour. It was a pleasant diversion in my gaming this week, where I didn’t have to fight big monsters or sit through extended cutscenes. All I had to do was live in the moment, mooching around this bright, colourful and wonky town that constantly delivered humour. I can’t recommend it enough.
Pros: Funny, bizarre, simple joy
Cons: It’s too short give me more of Terry
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For fans of: Spyro, Mario, offbeat humour
8/10: Excellent
Tiny Terry’s Turbo Trip is available now on Steam (version tested). Review code was provided by the publisher. Find a complete guide to GAMINGbible's review scores here.