Tiny Terry's Turbo Trip

Tiny Terry's Turbo Trip was provided by Super Rare Originals for review. Thank you!

This review used an LCD Steam Deck. OLED details will be coming later.

One of the perks of being a video game reviewer is the chance to play games you perhaps wouldn't normally interact with. Tiny Terry's Turbo Trip fits that bill for me. While at first glance, it may look like a silly, perhaps even childish, attempt at a driving adventure title, it's an awful lot of fun once you've settled down to enjoy it. So, let's buckle in and see what Tiny Terry's Turbo Trip is all about. Plus, that name is quite fun to say out loud...

Terry is a peculiar fellow—or should I say child, as it appears that our protagonist is still in elementary school despite being left alone for the Summer by his parents! But all this opens up the opportunity for our little protagonist to go off on an adventure not soon forgotten. Somehow, he applies for a job as a taxi driver, but not to ferry passengers; he just wants a car to ride up the Sky Tower and get to space!

This pretty much sets the scene for Tiny Terry's Turbo Trip, it's a whimsical and often humorous adventure of a child, struggling in school, who wants nothing more than to go to space and leave everything behind. The game somehow manages to evoke emotions with few words, with you quickly feeling sorry for Terry and the situation he finds himself in, despite Terry seemingly not feeling sorry for himself at all. He's on a mission, and it's your job to help him.

The car the taxi company gave him won't get him up the Sky Tower, so it's your job to explore the island and find junk that he can use to upgrade his turbo boost and get him to space. You'll meet a cast of quirky and interesting characters, go on quests to find hidden treasure, commit crimes (which aren't crimes in this city, apparently!), and even play some sports!

While you can walk around the entire map on foot, much of your game in Tiny Terry's Turbo Trip will be spent driving around in your car. The closest game I can equate the physics to is The Simpsons: Hit & Run, or Crazy Taxi. It's quite arcadey, there's no punishment for crashing, and it's easy to drive. It's nothing special, but how much can you do with a car?

The dialogue in the game is often humourous. Terry hardly speaks at all, often saying just 1 or 2 words in reply to a long question posed by the other participant, which often made me chuckle. The quests are as out there as the game's premise, and at times, the game almost has a Goat Simulator vibe with the random things you're asked to do.

Much like Goat Simulator, exploration is the word of the day here. The key resources you're after are junk to upgrade your car and money to make getting junk easier. You can find both of these dotted around the map; some are in plain sight, and others require you to use your "weapon" to smash open crates or your shovel to dig up treasure. There are also other collectibles you can find throughout the map, which all add to the list of things to do. Not to mention, many of the buildings in the game are accessible, often housing an activity or a shop, such as hats!

The game's presentation airs on the simple, perhaps basic, side of things, but it gets across what it needs to and has its unique charm. The sound follows the same suit, fitting well with the game, with no sounds that stand out as "annoying". It just does the job it has to do.

Tiny Terry's Turbo Trip is not a long game, and you will likely have finished at least the main story in less than 10 hours. If you want to collect everything, you'll probably want to add a few more hours unless you're using a guide.

However, as the "Overwhelmingly Positive" reviews on Steam (as of this review) indicate, Tiny Terry's Turbo Trip is a short but very sweet adventure. It oozes charm and is funny and lighthearted while occasionally dealing with situations that might seem upsetting. Seeing Terry power through and stubbornly reach for his dreams no matter what is just a wholesome thing to see, and I'm glad that the world he inhabits permits him to do so.

Tiny Terry's Turbo Trip - Steam Deck Performance

Tiny Terry's Turbo Trip gets off to a great start. The game defaults to 1280x800 and does have some preset settings. However, they're a bit too intense for the Steam Deck, and you can't play at 60 FPS with them.

The controls function just great on the Deck, and there's nothing to say here other than that using a controller feels like the way to go in Tiny Terry's Turbo Trip.

With all that in mind, let's look at our settings presets for TIny Terry's Turbo Trip. I have one focusing on Quality and Framerate, which runs at 60 FPS with nice visuals, and one focusing on Battery Life, which runs at 40 FPS, and sacrifices some visuals, but greatly improves your playing time.

Recommended Settings - 60 FPS

In your SteamOS settings, set an FPS Limit of 60 FPS / 60Hz. This preset does not have a TDP Limit.

You'll want to set your Texture Quality to High, Crowd Density to Ultra, LOD to High, Anti-Aliasing to None, and Shadow Quality to Medium. Then, enable Full Screen and Vsync and disable Bloom and SSAO.

While the Target Framerate setting seems to work fine for the most part, if you constantly see uneven frame times, you can try changing it to Unlimited instead of 60. I had this issue a couple of times.

For the most part, we can run at a stable 60 FPS with these settings. The one exception I found is that the game's grass taxes the Steam Deck. If you go into an area with a lot of grass, the framerate can easily drop to the low 50s, especially if you're walking/driving in the grass. Fortunately, the grass isn't too common, and for 80% of the map, you can hold 60 just fine, just expect some unavoidable drops in rural areas of the map.

The power draw stays around 16-20W, meaning Steam Deck LCD owners can expect around 2 hours of battery life from this preset and Steam Deck OLED users around 2.5 hours.

Temperatures varied from 70 to 80C, with the higher temperatures occurring more in areas with grass, which can cause the fan to ramp up and make a bit of noise.

Battery Life Settings - 40 FPS

Fortunately, Tiny Terry's Turbo Trip offers flexibility, allowing us to bring the power draw right down as long as we make some visual sacrifices. You can set your SteamOS framerate limit to 40 FPS / 40Hz here and your TDP Limit to 6W.

For the graphics, we're setting Texture Quality to High, Crowd Density to Low, Resolution to 1280x800, LOD to Low, Anti-Aliasing to None, Shadow Quality to None, Full Screen to On, Vsync to On, Bloom Off, and SSAO Off.

The Target Framerate issue doesn't apply here, as we're not getting close to the 60 FPS limit anyway.

Stability is similar to the Quality Preset, with the game holding 40 FPS for most of the time, but you can see drops around the grassy areas, which are a killer for the Steam Deck. The game always stays above 30 FPS and remains perfectly playable.

These lower settings drastically reduce the power draw, putting us at about 10-12W most of the time. Steam Deck LCD users should easily see 3 Hours of battery life, and Steam Deck OLED users at least 4 Hours, which is pretty nice.

Temperatures held around 60-65C for this preset. The fan noise was pretty quiet for the majority of playing.

Accessibility:

Tiny Terry's Turbo Trip doesn't offer much accessibility, although whether it needs many options is debatable. The game doesn't have voiced lines, so there's no need for subtitles. While the sound is nice, there are no parts of the game where hearing something is essential. There are camera sensitivity options, the ability to disable camera shaking, and UI scale and FoV sliders, but I found the scaling to be fine by default.

Conclusion:

Tiny Terry's Turbo Trip is a delightful adventure that will give you a few days of enjoyment, depending on how hard you go at it. It's been priced reasonably ($20 at the time of writing), and I think it's well worth the purchase if you're looking for a game with no pressures or time constraints being placed upon you. From what I played of the game, no mistake has any lasting penalty, and you can quickly retry any challenges within a few seconds of failing.

Terry is a mostly silent but endearing protagonist, and it's great to be able to help him achieve his dreams. I would love to see him feature in another game in the future.

Performance on the Steam Deck isn't perfect, but it's pretty close, and we have some flexibility to increase battery life or go all out on the visuals. It's just that pesky grass that gives us issues! Controls are perfect on the Deck; there are no issues there.

Our review is based on the PC version of this game.

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