Tiny Terry’s Turbo Trip is a silly little game where you, a bored child left with your uncle while your parents have gone on summer holiday (leaving you behind to go to summer school because you’re bad or stupid or something), decide to get a driving licence, a car, and then modify it so you can drive off into space. Obviously. And just LOOK at the art style. Look at it.

It plays out as an open world game where you collect items of rubbish that you can spend on car upgrades, and find money to buy items, weapons and so on. There are missions where you have to find stuff or go places, and loads of weird characters to meet. Like the guy who is clearly burning alive on the beach but refuses to listen to you saying he’s fine until you return later to find his charred remains and nick his sunglasses. For the guy in a back alley who wants you to help him do crimes, but not really bad crimes, just middling crimes. Or the kid who fences stolen cars. Or the fast food seller who is legally bound to give you “beach fries” for free whenever you ask, which you then take home to feed your fish with. It’s all very silly.

As a game, it’s a bit flawed. The physics are a bit wonky and the collision detection is terrible. Platforming is harder than it really needs to be partly because of the camera and partly because you can’t gauge depth properly. Some of the missions are a bit too vague to understand what you need to do, and the minigames (like yoga and football) are fun for a while but tedious when you have to do them enough times to hit a quota and complete a task.

That said, it is such an absurd game it really does have to be experienced. If only for the strange squashy pets you can “make” that follow you round for seemingly no purpose.

On the ugvm Podcast a number of months ago, Choobs spoke about Unicorn Overlord at length and the idea of battles within battles really appealed so I put it on a wishlist. I’ve now had the game for months but on a later episode of the same podcast, Kendrick dissed it and that put me off a bit so it got moved down the pile until I picked it out a couple of weeks ago. Well, Choobs was right and Kendrick was wrong because it’s amazing.

It’s the usual story of an evil person has taken over the world and it’s up to you, the long lost orphaned prince of the old regime to assemble an army and take it all back. It plays out as a series of essentially real-time strategy battles – which you can pause at any point to issue orders or use items so it’s not completely real-time – where each of your units is made up of a small group of individuals. Each of these units are completely customisable, so you can have several archers or several wyvern riders, or have up to six different classes in a single unit.

When your units collide with enemy units on the map, they have a fight. But unlike something like Fire Emblem or Advance Wars where it’s a simple exchange of blows, each fight is like an automatic turn based JRPG battle in which each character takes turns based on their speed and the actions of others.

Each character has their own strengths and weaknesses, like cavalry beat infantry, shields beat swords, massive hammers beat shields, and so on. The arrangement of characters in each unit matters too, so you put magic users or archers who are generally weak to direct attacks on the back row and people with shields and defensive moves on the front row.

So as well as all the fighting, most of which is to gain new allies or make regions safe, or free towns from the grip of the evil people who dress in red, there’s also a lot of overworld exploration to do. You find resources which can bring in money or help improve towns which in turn brings in more resources and therefore money and stuff. Doing missions, improving towns, improving your relationships within your army, and things like that also award you with another sort of currency called Honours, which you use to unlock more “character slots” within your army units, or to buy mercenaries, or to promote characters to a higher level class once you reach a certain point in the game.

There’s loads of depth, should you want to go into it. How characters work together in a unit, how different character combos in a unit deal with enemy units, how who you set as the leader of a unit changes the moveset of the unit, how different weapons can unlock special moves, or you can just do what I do and scattershot characters into units and hope they work. I’ve either been very lucky or it doesn’t matter that much.

It’s great. And I really appreciate the quality of life stuff they’ve included. Like, because the fights have pre-determined outcomes, you can just skip them if you want. It won’t show you how it plays out, with the strengths, weaknesses and combos your characters have, but you might know that already. You can also speed up walking, fights, conversations, and so on, which are notoriously slow in most RPGs. Another thing that’s great is inventory management. You can hold loads of things, nothing is in short supply, there are loads of shops, money is plentiful, and it’s clear how new weapons and accessories will affect the characters if you equip them. You can also buy and sell in bulk, which is another time-saver.

I did manage to get seemingly overlevelled by the end, as the final couple of battles were long but I was virtually untouchable. That might be just because I tried to mop up every side quest, mission and collection requirement as I played. That said, there’s something satisfying about pummeling the end boss with impunity after 70-odd hours of story and campaign.