Tiny Terry's Turbo Trip (2024)

Tiny Terry is not at all what I expected, and I'm positively thrilled by that. The creator's previous game, Wuppo, is one of my favourite games of all time, and was really there for me during a dark time in my life. The developer snekflat (formerly Knuist & Perzik) absolutely has a style, delivering some biting social commentary on the absurdity of day-to-day life through a lens of cute and goofy visuals. It's really something you have to play to experience, but they have something special going on.

You could call this game an open world collectathon, but that feels like a bit of an oversimplification. The entire game runs something like 4-10 hours, takes place in a single, small city, and consists of a handful of objectives that essentially fund the core adventure. The goal? Go to space. Terry starts the game by getting a job, simply so he can be provided a car, with no intention of actually doing the job. Your goal through the game is to collect Turbo Junk, and use that to upgrade your car so it can go fast enough to launch into space. You'll find Turbo Junk just laying around, but the vast majority of it is had by helping people around town with their tasks. One guy wants to commit crimes, but without hurting anyone or taking from them. The city is facing a bankruptcy crisis, and needs a solution to fudge the numbers. A beachside restaurant has lost too much money giving fries to Terry, who won a raffle for unlimited fries, and Terry helps by inventing a new menu item.

I typically don't enjoy 3D platformers or collectathon games, but the humour here absolutely carries the whole experience. You're not collecting 300 puzzle pieces for no reason, you're jumping from one insane scenario to another to... Launch yourself into space with a loaner car. It's silly, it's frequently laugh-out-loud funny, and it's just a game that makes you smile.

snekflat is definitely one of my favourite developers, and this game is truly something special. I liked Wuppo a bit more for the specific themes about outgrowing an old life, but Tiny Terry is absolutely a worthy game. Absolutely loved it.

4.5/5 Tiny Terry's Turbo Trip is a third person adventure game that feels like it could have been released during the Nintendo 64/Playstation 1 era, and I mean that in the best way. It's a quirky adventure game with some very light platforming and puzzles to solve.

The entire premise revolves around a kid (Terry) who is home for the summer and decides he wants a car to go to space. You start out getting a "job" just so you can get a car. The problem, and where our gameplay loop starts, is that you need to collect junk to upgrade your car so it can make it to space. In driving around and interacting with the characters in this world, you'll help solve their problems, find problems of your own, uncover corruption, and many other unexpected twists and turns. The writing here frequently had me audibly laughing.

The game itself isn't very hard, and you can complete it within probably 5 hours. If going for all achievements that will take an additional few hours, with my play time finishing at 7.7 hours. I enjoyed every minute of it and highly recommend you pick up this short, but incredibly sweet adventure!

A wise man tipped me off to the existence of this game, and I’m grateful. Tiny Terry’s Turbo Trip is a short, absurd adventure that is a mixture of A Short Hike, Breath of the Wild and Grand Theft Auto that somehow works while managing to be its own wonderful little thing that gave me many a good chuckle.

The best part is that you can don a pigeon on your head in lieu of a hat and it will happily coo away as you play. And if I have one regret it’s not discovering this sooner.

I really like the trend of short, low-stakes collectathon indie platformers in the vein of A Short Hike. Tiny Terry's Turbo Trip exists in that space, dials down a bit of the heartfelt vibes but dials up the irreverence... which I honestly found pretty refreshing.

The setting of Sprankelwater feels like a sleepier, coastal cousin of O-Town from Rocko's Modern Life. I adore its purposely derpy, asymmetrical, gummy-looking denizens, and the dialog that tumbles out of their mouths is just as entertaining.

The map is not my favorite. There are corners that feel under-developed, like they're missing a secret or two in comparison to the denser sections. But this didn't discourage me from 100% completing the game over the course of two long train rides to and from a conference I was traveling to.