At a time when massive 50-plus-hour games are soaking in the limelight, I love stepping into smaller experiences that leave me satisfied after a sub-10-hour playthrough. Of course, being an independent games media site, we cover a lot of short indie games but sometimes a game is so charming you can’t wait to tell people about it. And that’s where I am now. So without any more suspense, let’s talk about Tiny Terry’s Turbo Trip from Snekflat and why I liked it so much.
For starters, Tiny Terry’s Turbo Trip (which I will write as TTTT) is a 3D adventure game set in the bite-sized open world of Sprankelwater. If that name sounds odd to you, most names (of people and places) in TTTT are. After a bad semester at school, Terry is left alone to attend summer school while his parents go on vacation. We join Terry as he achieves his first goal in his ambitious two-step plan to get famous and not go to summer school: get a car. After that, Terry, and you as the person controlling him, are set loose on the city, free to explore it at your leisure, as you work to complete step two: go to space!
To get to space, you must upgrade Terry’s car 9 times by collecting turbo junk scattered around the city. Along the way, you’ll also dig up money and gather bugs. The map (which you open by tapping up on the d-pad) gives a detailed breakdown of everything you need. Points of interest in the city are highlighted with small checkmarks next to ones you’ve already completed, and a tasklist on the bottom of the screen lets you see, at a glance, what objectives you can work toward. This may sound daunting but rest assured, much like the tone of the game, these tasks are small side quests or reoccurring jokes that really don’t take too much effort to complete.
Speaking of jokes, TTTT is an often funny game. While I didn’t quite cackle as I played, there were more than enough hearty smiles and lighthearted chuckles. This is all (mostly) thanks to the writing, which unwaveringly sticks to the bit, even if it’s totally out of left field. From a tanning beachgoer to a bumper car lunatic, there were many random encounters in TTTT that I remember fondly. While there is no voice acting here, I still think part of the humor works because of the delivery. The game’s deliberate pauses following certain punchlines act like fourth wall breaks where it almost seems like a character is staring at the audience.
While I’m on the topic of things that work well in this game, I have to mention the music from Thomas de Waard. It is perfect here, offering a nice mix of jovial and repetitive to make for tracks that I found getting stuck in my head long after I put the game down. As a whole, the sound design goes well with the stylized aesthetics of Tiny Terry’s Turbo Trip. Things pop, bounce, and slide with a Saturday morning cartoon level of theatricality and it really brings the whole game together.
It’s also important to mention that I played through the entirety of Tiny Terry’s Turbo Trip over the course of three days on my Steam Deck. It took me a little over five hours to complete all but two things in the game but that’s with me spending the last hour cleaning up activities around Sprankelwater. If you want to mainline the game, TTTT can be completed in under four hours, but it is well worth taking your time. Even if it’s just for a joke you didn’t see coming. I really do think the game is best when played in small “bite-sized” chunks and the Steam Deck was a perfect platform to do just that. Performance was nearly flawless, save for the occasional traffic pop-in while driving or gliding around the city.
In case I haven’t driven the point home (no pun intended), Tiny Terry’s Turbo Trip is a sandbox game and while “GTA for kids” might be an easy way to frame it, I think fans of old-school PlayStation 2 games like The Simpsons: Hit & Run will feel right at home here. Every time I booted up the game, I would focus on a different task. If I had just dug up a bunch of turbo junk last session, then this time, I’m going to explore the map to catch jumping bugs or flying blueprints. I could have ended the game an hour and a half before I did but, to me, it was worth seeing more of Sprankelwater and tying up loose ends.
After all that, I only have three real reserveations when recommending the game. The first is about the driving. By and large, it’s fun to drive Terry’s tiny yellow car around the city but there are times where manevuring it can be frustrating. While it’s nothing major, it can certainly act as a bump in the otherwise smooth gameplay loop (still no pun intended) and might lead players to use fast travel in the late game. The other point has to do with the camera angles. In the open world you can move the camera around relatively freely (and even switch to first person by clicking R3) but in buildings the game switches to fixed camera angles that make it hard to naviagte certain areas. The last thing is about the quest design. Part of the game’s humor relies on its missions being pointless. If everything else in the game works for you (like it did for me) then this shouldn’t be a problem, but some people might find the busywork to be just that.
I really do want to emphasize how nice it feels to play a game where the objectives don’t feel overwhelming. Don’t get me wrong, I love playing the emboldened hero that’s saving the world or stopping a shadowy organization from starting nuclear war as much as the next guy, but sometimes it’s nice to just drive around a cartoony city full of colorful characters as a kid whose only goal is to go to space so he can get famous and skip summer school. TTTT works as intended right out of the box and guarantees at least a few hours of leisurely fun. Tiny Terry’s Turbo Trip is available now on PC via Steam. A review code was provided by the publisher.
