Mid-Year Double Review ("Tiny Terry's Turbo Trip" and "Still Wakes the Deep")

Publisher: Super Rare Originals/Super Rare Games

Developer: Snekflat

Platforms: Microsoft Windows (Reviewed for)

Tiny Terry's Turbo Trip takes place in the cartoonish Germany-adjacent town of Sprankelwater: a city drowning in debt after spending thousands upon thousands upon thousands of moneys (the in-game currency) to build the tallest tower in the world. You play as the titular Terry, who doesn't care about any of that jazz! Terry is an elementary school student left out of his family's summer trip so that he can go to summer school to fix his grades. However, Terry has other plans. See, that aforementioned tallest tower in the world was basically built in the middle of a road, so the road goes up both sides of the tower at a 90 degree angle. So, at the start of the game, Terry finds himself in the local employment office accepting a taxi driver job in the hopes of improving the car enough to drive up that road and into space. Why does this little child get offered a taxi driver job? Why is the employer totally ok with Terry not doing any work? These questions, among many others, are unimportant...which is pretty fitting, because this game is itself fairly unimportant. But lest you misunderstand me, let's talk in a bit more detail.

At its heart, I'd call this game a cozier version of The Simpsons: Hit and Run. It's all about just driving around in your car and doing little side things without the hassle of a timer or a fail state. You obviously have the overarching goal of getting your car upgraded enough to go to space, but there's no rush. While I didn't do everything possible, I still made it to space within maybe 3 hours. So when I say there's no rush, I mean it. As for how you get to space in the first place, you'll find pieces of junk around town, and for every 150 of these things collected, you can upgrade the car's turbo functionality. In addition to finding these pieces in the world, you can also gain batches of 100 pieces by completing side objectives. By my count, you only need to collect around half of the available junk pieces to complete the game, so while you don't need to reach 100% completion, you'll need to do at least a couple side quests in order to reach the credits. These quests range from collecting four different types of insects to collecting a certain amount of money to somehow committing a crime (in a city with no laws) without violence. For the most part, these little adventures are amusing and laid back. There is, however, one activity that actually got me frustrated: the soccer game. Ever since Hauntii, I'm thinking I have a second cardinal sin of gameplay to take a full point off for when I see it: 2.5D movement on a 2D background. The soccer minigame commits this sin, as you need to kick the ball at precise angles that are basically impossible to get right with the movement abilities you have. This wouldn't have been so bad if all you needed to do to complete the quest was win the game, but you have to win the game with a score of 5 or higher. This took me several attempts, and it was the one frustrating asterisk on this otherwise zen experience. 

Normally this is where I'd put a discussion of the game's technical state, but I really have nothing much to say about this one. My only note is that the driving doesn't feel like it was tuned effectively for the game's roads. There aren't any gigantic flaws, but the game doesn't do anything too impressive in the first place. And that right there is a perfect description of my biggest problem with the game: it just doesn't stick out in my head. It's a game that I pretty much forgot the day after I finished it. So, while it's an amusing little time killer you can pick up and get through in an afternoon, it's nothing to write home about. Pretty good, just not a standout.

Let us review:

Soccer minigame - 1.0

Ultimately forgettable - 1.0

Slightly wonky driving - 0.3

The final score for Tiny Terry's Turbo Trip is...

7.7/10 - Pretty Good

Fair enough, Snekflat, fair enough!

Publisher: Secret Mode

Developer: The Chinese Room

Platforms: Playstation 5 (Reviewed for), Xbox Series X/S, Microsoft Windows

Let's get this out of the way as quickly as possible: I've played a lot of walking simulators of both the cozy and horror-adjacent varieties, and I generally tend to enjoy them (despite how fast-paced I normally like my gameplay). I'm also definitely no stranger to the works of The Chinese Room, the development studio behind Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs, Dear Esther, and this game. With that in mind, I can say this with 100% certainty: Still Wakes the Deep is the best of them all. 

In Still Wakes the Deep, you play as Caz MacLeary: an electrician working aboard a Scottish oil rig in the 1970's. One day, the rig drills into something beneath the waves that shouldn't have been drilled into, and spookiness ensues. From there, Caz travels around the rig working with the other workers to try and get out alive. This being largely a walking simulator, it was important for the story and characters to carry the weight that otherwise would've been carried by combat...and given that I called this game the best of the walking simulators, I hope it isn't any surprise that the story and characters are a success! But even better than the characters is the sense of established camaraderie between them. This is a cast of characters with a noticeable history together, and the writing is top-tier enough that this history feels believable right from the get-go. For instance, there's a point where Caz is talking to another character and telling them that the Chef is praying for them. The character then responds with something to the effect of (and be sure to read this with a thick Scottish accent) "aye, he's a Barnsley fan, he's used to praying!" I haven't the foggiest idea what Barnsley is or if I even spelled it correctly, but I don't need to know for sure...the writing in this exchange is enough to tell me that the chef is a fan of a sports team that the rest of the rig isn't a fan of. It's a simple thing, but it goes a long way, and this is just one example. 

Everything I've said so far obviously sets up a story to have some great impact, but Still Wakes the Deep also employs a strategy I don't see very often to make that impact really hit. Let me give you an example of this strategy. At the start of the original Bioshock, after stepping out of the bathysphere and getting in touch with Atlas, you spend a little bit of time fighting splicers and learning how to play the game, all to the tune of little-to-no music. After facing these twisted people and watching the city fall apart at the seams for a little while, you get into an elevator, at which point Atlas starts telling you about his family trapped in the city. He ends this spiel with "I know you must feel like the unluckiest guy in the world right now, but you're the only hope I'll ever see my wife and child again." The entire time he's talking, the game's first non-creepy soundtrack piece starts playing, punctuating the desperation of the situation and the emotional stakes to come. To this day, I hold this section of Bioshock as one of the best-framed narrative moments in gaming history, and that's in a game with several excellently-framed narrative moments. Still Wakes the Deep employs this same strategy with its audio. The game is largely lacking in music, but when it needs to establish an emotional moment, it brings some of this year's most beautiful music to the forefront. Oh, and the voice acting is also stellar across the board. Literally every possible thing that plays into making a narrative impactful is done perfectly.

So that's the story/characters/etc, which is obviously the most important part of a game in this genre. However, that doesn't mean there's nothing to talk about on the gameplay front. For Still Wakes the Deep, gameplay consists mainly of quicktime events and light stealth. 

Let's start off with the stealth. It's about as bare-bones as it gets. You'll hide in lockers and in crawlspaces as monsters patrol the area. You can throw objects to lure the monster's attention elsewhere, and that's about as complicated as it gets. I'll say this, however: in these kinds of horror-adjacent walking simulators, I tend to dread the monster segments. They tend to be tedious, time-consuming, and frustrating. But in Still Wakes the Deep, they're just simple enough to be tense while lacking the expected tedium.

To jump to the other side of gameplay, quicktime events get a bit of a bad rap thanks to David Cage and his schlock, but they aren't necessarily a bad thing. In fact, there's one quicktime event this game features that is handled in a new way I haven't seen before. Climbing ladders isn't exactly groundbreaking gameplay. Neither is holding down a button to retain your grip on a ladder. But I've never seen a ladder-climbing system where releasing the grip button has the character slide down with their feet on the sides of the ladder. Taking time out of my review to praise something as simple as that probably makes me seem like an IGN reviewer or something, but I legitimately liked this new approach to ladder-climbing.

Speaking of IGN, playing this game after watching their review has reminded me that they have little-to-no credibility as a games journalism outlet. The reviewer complained about the game being painfully linear, then complained about how frequently he got lost and didn't know what was expected of him. Allow me to disavow you of these notions: while the game IS 100% linear, I'd argue it's borderline impossible not to know what to do or where to go next. There's no non-beaten path to walk down, you're funneled where you need to go almost all the time, and as for what's expected of you, it's just basic logic. Is there steam coming out of a pipe that burns you? Clearly you have to find a valve and close it. Basic things like that, which we've been conditioned to know how to handle since Half-Life. The only exceptions to these points are the few segments that require you to get somewhere fast. Most of the time, these are scripted sequences where you're chased by a monster and have to weave your way through a portion of the rig. In these sequences, paths will suddenly become blocked, the monster will appear down the hallway in front of you, things like that, and you'll have to react accordingly. As I said, these are scripted, so there's only one way these things can go...but it's a crap shoot whether or not you'll get it right on the first try. Sometimes the timing isn't forgiving enough and you'll get caught while you're still turning trying to find where to go next. Sometimes you'll get hung up on a bit of terrain and get caught that way. Other than chase sequences, there's also one or two segments where the area you're in starts to flood and you have to keep swimming upward and looking for a place to surface. In these segments, the visibility and movement speed just aren't good enough to make it through in one go. Like with the chase sequences, you only have one way to go that'll work, it just might take two attempts. A teeny tiny bit of a pain, for sure, but nothing too bad.

The technical side of things is another one of Still Wakes the Deep's triumphs. Graphics, textures, atmosphere, sound, music, voice acting, everything. I already touched on the game's use of music earlier, so that's where I'll leave the tech discussion.

Folks, I'm an old man of 31. I start winding down for bed in the 9:00-10:00 PM window, and if I stay up too late, I turn into dust. It's been a long time since I've allowed a game to eat into that time window, but on my first evening with Still Wakes the Deep, I found myself staying up later and later wanting to know what happened next. That's about the highest praise I can imagine giving a walking simulator, so if what I've said thus far has sounded good to you, give it a shot!

Let us review:

Slight chase/swim sequence problems - 0.5

The final score for Still Wakes the Deep is...

9.5/10 - Near Masterpiece

Excellent work, The Chinese Room, excellent work!