Tiny Terry’s Turbo Trip Review (PS5)

Terry has a problem. See, Terry needs a car, but Terry doesn’t have a job or the means to get one. That’s why Terry is at the Spranklewater job centre, the one where his crush works the reception desk. Luckily for Terry, the job centre also doubles as office space for the eccentric local taxi company owner, who offers Terry a gig on the spot. A job and a car? What fortune!

And why is it that Terry needs a car in the first place? To go to space, of course.

I can’t stress enough how much sense this makes in Terry’s world. Maybe not the world in which he actually lives, but certainly the one that he experiences. I played Tiny Terry’s Turbo Trip to 100% completion and I still can’t tell to how much of Spranklewater’s crime-positive, Junk-hoarding, Babel-esque highway-tower-into-the-heavens-building vibe I should have taken at face value and how much is a shared hallucination with an unsupervised, clearly neurodivergent child.

I’m also wondering if this is possible

I admire Terry immensely, though. I see a lot of myself in his deadpan expressions, single-word answers and impatience to explain himself or his actions. But he’s also quite unlike me in that he’s got a clear goal, and the resolve to see it through. No amount of scepticism from those around him, no lack of means or experience, not even a boring job as an unlicensed taxi driver will get between him and his ticket out of the atmosphere.

Yes, despite kicking off with gainful employment as a taxi driver, there isn’t actually any taxi-ing to be done in Tiny Terry’s Turbo Trip. Money isn’t important to Terry’s space mission, what’s important is upgrading his work car to be fast enough that it’ll take him into space, which is achieved by amassing a huge collection of Junk to give to the local garage owner. They happen to also be the taxi company owner, and ask surprisingly few questions.

And so the actual game here is to run, jump and drive around the tiny town, exploring its secrets, helping its citizens with inane tasks and smashing its smashables, all in the name of collecting enough Junk to secure your mission into the stars. It’s a small-scale, open world 3D collectathon platformer with flexible goals, a microcosmic blend of GTA and Banjo Kazooie. It’s also deeply funny.

This is what bureaucracy actually looks like

Humour in games can be hit-or-miss, often requiring the player to engage with the written text, or to listen to the quips, or be paying attention to blink-and-you’ll-miss-it sight gags. Terry has plenty of these, but it also manages to mine scores of comedy gold from the veins of its game design. I loathe to use the word “subversive,” but it feels appropriate here in the way that Tiny Terry’s Turbo Trip constantly plays with expectations, especially those implied by its genre inspirations and the specific games and tropes it appears to parody.

Sometimes it’s something simple that’ll get you, like the way that you can “hijack” cars a la Grand Theft Auto, only Terry jumps into the passenger’s seat and directs the original driver from there. Or the fact that quest givers never actually have your rewards on-hand, they’re almost always buried in the desert due to the town’s favourable attitude toward criminal activity. Or the obligatory bug-catching mechanic that gives you the net and know-how but expects you’ll figure out on your own that you can accidentally step on and crush the insects you’re chasing.

Then there’s the absolutely absurd stuff. A dedicated hint system where you have to visit a squatter in a dilapidated laundromat and give him 15 Money to play his hand organ and summon the spinning image of a location in one of the tumble dryers, for example. I could go on, but the more organically these bits are discovered the better.

In another life, I would have really liked just doing laundry and taxes with you

Actually, no, I have one more. One of the many folks you can chat with around town and do tasks for in exchange for junk is another unsupervised child, this time one that’s keen on earning a bit of commission flipping stolen cars for their dad. Easy, I thought, jacking the first vehicle that drove by. My new acquaintance wouldn’t take it, though. Remember when I said the drivers don’t leave their stolen rides? Yeah. But no problem! You can take parked cars too, so I went and pinched the closest one, a fancy-looking sports car. The kid wouldn’t accept this either, telling me that they were pretty sure it was a neighbour’s car and thus too risky.

This makes no sense, I pondered. There are maybe four or five distinct car models in this game and they’re all randomly spawned onto the road and into parking spaces. There’s a condition to this that I’m missing. I tried again, a handful of times, and got the same result—another potential neighbour’s car. Then it dawned on me. All of the vehicles I was stealing were within a general radius of the apartment building that my quest-giver was loitering behind. They were the neighbour’s cars. I went one block over and instantly had a lot more success.

I had fooled myself, and I could almost hear Dutch developer, snekflat, chuckling knowingly at me. I think this might be one of my favourite bits of all time.

Can’t argue with the logic

Taken separately to the sharp comedic writing and goofy design, this is a fairly straightforward indie task-em-up with just enough exploration, moreish collecting, hat purchasing and minigames to take over an afternoon—longer if you plan on scouring every last inch of Spranklewater on the road to all of the trophies/achievements. Fans of recent small studio efforts like A Short Hike, A Hat in Time or Lil’ Gator Game will feel right at home, as well anyone who grew up on the 3D platformers of yore.

Backing all of this up is a stellar work of artistic vision, a city made of intentionally lo-fi assets that wouldn’t look out of place on the PlayStation 2 but packed as densely and presented as cohesively as any modern game. It’s full of wonderful touches, the way that the 3D character models automatically turn and morph along with the camera, the way objects have a slight shake/boil effect reminiscent of hand-drawn cartoons, the number of delightfully goofy camera angles you’ll find in indoor scenes. It’s just fun to look at, which I appreciate immensely.

Kids ask the tough questions

The music slaps, too. There are banger tunes sprinkled throughout, and whoever thought to soundtrack Terry’s phone calls with a beat that incorporates that annoying speaker feedback you used to get by having your phone too close—I need you to know that I love you.

The only wrinkle in this new console version of the game, at least in the PS5 version that I played, is a consistent and distracting issue with fluidity when moving around the town. It’s hard to say whether it’s all a matter of performance, or something in how the camera moves, but there’s an overall jerkiness and juddering to general traversal. I’m hoping that the underlying issue is tidied up soon after launch, because as it stands it can be quite uncomfortable to play.

Final Thoughts

Terry’s console debut is well worth a look-in for anyone yet to be charmed by the tale of a town with no laws, a road with no end and a boy with limits. If I could focus on anything with half as much pluck and determination as Terry and his mission to space, I’d be unstoppable. It’s a shame that some pretty egregious performance issues exist in the PS5 version right now, but look past them and you’ll see one of the most absurd, bold, funny and endearing little adventures in recent memory.

Reviewed on PS5. Review code supplied by publisher.

Click here for more information on WellPlayed’s review policy and ethics.