Indie Game of the Week 420: Tiny Terry's Turbo Trip

It's episode 420 so what better time for some turbo tripping? Tiny Terry's Turbo Trip from, uh, developer "snekflat" is our tiny topic this time: an open-world messing around simulator that owes as much to Grand Theft Auto and its multitudinous progeny as it does Goat Simulator's very particular brand of child-delighting arbitrary mayhem. The titular troublemaking tot Tiny Terry has been stranded at home by his parents, denied a place in their vacation plans due to needing additional summer schooling to address his falling grades. Understanding keenly what's at stake and how he should comport himself absent any parental supervision, Tiny Terry determines the only route going forward is to acquire a vehicle under false pretenses, soup it up as much as its engine will allow, and use the resulting thrust to reach escape velocity and become the first kid to have driven into space. Fortunately, or perhaps unfortunately depending on your tolerance for fiscal irresponsibility, the local burg of Sprankelwater just spent several times their yearly budget to build the enormous "Sky Tower" which includes two ramp-shaped walls that extend upwards to beyond what is visible. His summer plans set in stone, Tiny Terry needs only to find enough "turbo junk" scattered around Sprankelwater to sufficiently upgrade his ride so he might slip the surly bonds of Earth and touch the face of God.

There is some structure to the game, though it's largely built for loose experimentation first and foremost. Various NPCs around town will give you tasks to do, or just demand money, and in exchange will direct you to places where they've buried junk—usually in the desert, though in one case the local pet cemetery. These caches reward 100 turbo junk right off the bat, as opposed to the single pieces you find littered around the streets and on top of buildings. Since you only need to get around a thousand pieces of this junk to max out the benefits of upgrading your whip, you'll hit the target required to commence with the ending sequence long before you've found everything or completed all the tasks the game has for you. Still, the meat of the game, so to speak, are in these little NPC missions which also include a few mini-games and the brunt of the game's silly deadpan sense of humor so they're worth pursuing in full regardless. It's kinda like the substories in any given Like a Dragon game: sure, you could mainline the story and only do a scattered few of those bonus sidequests, but I would argue that you're missing the point. (Or, well, I guess the real point with this type of game is that you can do as much or as little of its content as you'd prefer. The world is your oyster, but maybe the pearl's all you're after in the end.)

A typical task might involve helping a criminal perform crimes that "don't go against his principles" (no violence, no emotional trauma) and that simply involves marching into City Hall, stealing an important-looking document that details just how badly in debt everyone is, and allowing the criminal to use it as blackmail. In exchange, you can use the money he rewards you to help solve the debt by "adding a few zeroes", a.k.a. standard municipal bureaucracy. Nodding to its chief inspiration you can also sell stolen cars through a friend of yours: since the new owners bought these cars with money, they're no longer stolen and everything's above board. Terry's mostly nonchalant through the vast majority of these interactions because his heart is set on his interplanetary goal and no amount of petty crime or specious reasoning will deter him, while at the same time the violence is so comically dumb that it's unlikely to offend anyone.

Beyond that it's a fairly typical open-world crime game in a microcosm that's filled with plasticine Gumby lookalikes. Sprankelwater is as relatively tiny as Terry is with only a few districts of note and a pair of vendors with multiple branches—one sells useful "junk" like a shovel (if you don't just find one lying around) for digging up treasure (i.e. trash) or a butterfly net for catching various things besides just bugs; while the other just sells hats—and beyond the small set of missions it provides and a whole lot of scouring the place for what are at least manifestly visible pieces of blue power-up junk there's not much more to the main loop. I recall Grubb talking about plopping his preschooler kids in front of the game and letting them loose in its jovial playground of a setting and that strikes me as perhaps the ideal audience playing it the ideal way. Besides Goat Simulator, you're also looking at similar recent cute and kid-friendly exploration-heavy games like Lil Gator Game, Little Kitty Big City, or A Short Hike as being of a like mind. Just joyful experiences about poking around a world where nothing can really harm you to find whatever emergent fun, designed or otherwise, might leap out at you. Still, there's no maximum age limit for a game where you're running around town hitting people with a wrench, or getting into turbo bumper car contests with the local jerk Ricky, or flirting with the permanently drooling receptionist at the job center to her utter indifference.

Tiny Terry's Turbo Trip is one of those games where I might have my minor misgivings—it's irritating to get around until you unlock the fast travel quite a ways into the core progression, having all your quest rewards require the extra step of heading to some middle-of-nowhere spot to dig them up just strikes me as unnecessary busywork, and you do need to spend some amount of time farming cash to alleviate some backtracking frustration later—but they're really inconsequential in the long-run because the game just has this engrossing, playful sense of chaos to it that I found myself appreciating, boiling down a fairly long-in-the-tooth 3D genre to its barest essentials and a compact world size while maintaining the same degree of anarchic fun. Given GTA itself has veered in the opposite direction with its last few installments and become one of the most miserable, self-serious series around, it feels smart that its imitators choose to seize on this fumble (he says, knowing full well GTA VI will be the biggest thing on the planet when it finally launches). If you've been jonesing for a certain type of game that was everywhere in the PS2 and 360 era and has mostly since dried up, you like yourself some dry nonsense humor that at no point involves torturing a person with electrodes connected to their vulnerable areas, or you just miss that innocent time when you were a kid and could spend the entire summer collecting trash in order to shoot your car into outer space, then ol' Quad-T over here is absolutely worthy of your consideration.

Rating: 5 out of 5.