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Hugh Likes Video Games: Tiny Terry’s Turbo Trip

April 4, 2025

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Tiny Terry’s Turbo Trip

Published by Super Rare Originals

Developed by Snekflat

Played on Nintendo Switch

The Skinny: A weird little sandbox game about driving to space.

Tiny Terry’s Turbo Trip is a truly weird but highly enjoyable sandbox game about driving to space. Terry, a child living in the entirely law-free city of Spranklewater, wants to drive to space. To accomplish his goal, he’s gotten a job as a taxi driver, with a tiny car, and which he absolutely will not do. You will, at no point in this game, give anyone a ride anywhere. What you will do is collect a lot of junk and money to upgrade your car, complete quests, and interact with the charming and bizarre town and its citizens before making your fateful trip.
Tiny Terry isn’t a long game, perhaps 6-8 hours if you try and do everything, and a slim 2-3 if you just focus on accomplishing the main quest. Terry can’t be injured and there is no lose condition, although he’ll lose money if he runs into a cactus or otherwise comes to harm. This is a very casual and kid-friendly game where you explore the town, play mini-games, dig up random piles of dirt, and trade in the junk you find to upgrade your car to one day drive all the way up the side of the town’s tallest building and eventually slip the surly bonds of gravity.
The game itself isn’t very challenging, but the hook lays in its charm. The graphics have a blocky, Gamecube-like quality to them, and the little town is packed full of quirky characters and hidden secrets. You can play soccer with the kids you’re supposed to be going to summer school with, collect bugs to help a beachside snack bar stay in business, and commit Grand Theft Auto and other crimes. The humor in the game feels like it’s a draw for the pre-teen crowd, with weird characters, eating bugs, and a guy so sunburned he catches on fire. There’s a lot packed into this tiny game, and every minute is a delight.
While it’s a bit too slight to be truly great, Tiny Terry’s Turbo Trip is a little indie gem that will get you through a relaxing weekend or a long plane ride. It was previously available from Steam and is now on consoles. It’s well worth checking out!

Hugh Likes Video Games: Animal Well

October 18, 2024

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Animal Well

Developed by: Shared Memory

Published by: Bigmode

Played on Nintendo Switch

The Skinny: You know where you are? You’re in the jungle, baby! You’re gonna DIE!

With its throwback graphics and simple character blob, one could be forgiven for thinking that Animal Well is a simple exploration game. But the deeper a player ventures into the labyrinthine screens of the well, the more complex and layered the game becomes.


With graphics reminiscent of a 80s console, Animal Well tasks the payer with retrieving the flames of four lamps, scattered throughout a huge maze of single-screen rooms full of puzzles and secrets. Like in any Metroidvania, the player will gain tools and weapons along the way, but the tiny blob of the player’s character can’t do much fighting, and is better off running away from the menagerie of animals found inside the well, most of which will try and make a meal out of the protagonist. The tools you discover on the way are all interesting riffs on children’s toys, such as the Slink, the Bubble Wand and the Throwing Disk. Impeccably designed, each tool has multiple uses. For example, the Disk can be used to hit switches, be ridden to distant places, or thrown to distract dogs who would otherwise chase you. Learning the different uses for every item is key to solving the mysteries of the Well. 


In addition to your main objectives, there are eggs to collect, a host of different animals to interact with and a truly staggering amount of secrets to uncover. Even after rolling credits on the game, there will still be puzzles and mysteries to uncover, with an old-school expectation that you will solve them without hints, and even an ARG-like component to puzzles that require multiple players in different instances. Truly, there is no end to the depth of this Well.
Animal Well’s graphics and sound design are also deceptively simple, but their masterful implementation shows hidden depth. Each of the single screens is full of clever lighting and animation effects that surprise and delight, elevating the Atari-style graphics. Much like with modern pixel art styles, it creates the feel of how you remember old-school graphics rather than the graphics themselves. The sound design evokes the hidden world of the Well with dripping water, off-screen effects, animal calls, and other mysterious sounds.


Animal Well is a rich, complex exploration game filled with hard as nails enemy encounters, fiendishly tricky puzzles, and tantalizing mysteries. It is available on PC and all major consoles.

Hugh Likes Video Games: Dredge

June 7, 2024

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Dredge: Deluxe Edition

Developed by: Black Salt Games

Published by Team 17

Played on Nintendo Switch

The Skinny: The horror of a cozy fishing game

During the day, things are relatively calm, if bleak. Players will catch the occasional horrifying aberration, which can be sold for bonus money at the fishmonger. When the Sun goes down, things become more difficult, with the thick fog hiding deadly rocks, as well as terrifying sea creatures such as lights in the distance that appear to be other vessels, but are really giant angler fish-like monsters. Some fish can only be caught at night, though, so you’ll have to tough it out if you want to catch everything. The game does allow players to turn off random monsters and scary events if you just want to get down to the fishing.
The fishing itself if quite good, with complex but easy enough to grasp mechanics and a gentle gameplay curve and loop that encourages players to upgrade their boat and explore the game’s five diverse areas. Different rods, nets, crab pots and engines are available, and the ship itself can also be upgraded to increase durability and cargo space. You always feel like you are improving, even as the tension in the story and environments ratchets upward.
The story path is creepy, but being able to tackle it at your own pace makes it easier. The areas you go through on your quest are varied and interesting, which helps too. You’ll sail around crumbling, abandoned cliffs, a haunted atoll, a maze of mangrove trees, and volcanic ruins. Each area has their own unique catchable fish as well as their own dangers to avoid. These range from environmental obstacles like falling rocks and tornadoes in Gull Cliffs to active enemies such as the giant tentacled monstrosity crouched in the deep water of the basin. There are also other monsters and NPCs scattered around the map with their own rewards and challenges. The game is stuffed full of treasure-filled wrecked ships and planes, but some are giant crab-like mimics that will attack you when you get close, for example.
With its compelling gameplay loop and atmospheric main story, Dredge is a great little fishing game that does something different than the Bass Pro Challenges of the world. Indie game fans who are looking for something different should check this one out. Dredge is available electronically from Steam and all the usual e-shops. The physical Deluxe Edition comes bundled with the Blackstone Key expansion, which grants a couple useful items in-game, as well as a poster and art book. You can find it for current generation consoles online and wherever video games are sold.

Hugh Likes Video Games: Balatro

May 24, 2024

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Balatro

Developed by LocalThunk

Published by Playstack

Played on Nintendo Switch

The Skinny: The House always wins. But let’s do another run, just to be sure.

Balatro is a deck-building rogue-like based around poker. But rather than present you with a simulation of opponents, the presentation is simplified down to core elements. The player presented with a hand of cards floating in a void, and are challenged to beat an escalating series of score challenges. But while Balatro uses the structure and hands of a poker deck, it feels a lot more like Fluxx.
While you are building poker hands to survive each round, the real goal of the game is to change the rules to suit your strategy. Between rounds, players go to a Scorched Earth-style shop screen, where they are offered a rotating selection of different options to change the rules and contents of their deck. Planet cards make poker hands more valuable, while Tarot and Celestial cards have a number of different wild effects. You can also add new cards with special abilities such as giving players bonus money or points. But the most important cards for sale are the Jokers. Jokers sit outside of the player’s deck and add different ongoing rules. They might buff the scores of certain suits or change the rules to allow players to skip cards when making straights, for example. There are over a hundred Jokers, and players unlock new ones by completing hidden objectives in each run.
Optimization is the core of the gameplay, by removing the opponent and focusing on making the best hand possible with the best rules possible, Balatro takes the core gameplay of deck-builders like Slay the Spire and distills them down to a potent core loop. By removing the action and exploration elements from games like Hades, the challenge changes from reaching a goal to making the numbers go up. And the thrill of watching those numbers rise as you struggle to stay ahead of the challenge curve is the beating heart of the game. The house might always win, but watching a successful combo turn a lowly pair into an unstoppable juggernaut is a pure hit of dopamine.


Balatro’s simple, pixel-based aesthetic reinforces the focused premise. You aren’t sitting at a perfectly recreated poker table with 4K graphics to discern between every fiber of the felt surface. There aren’t any lovingly modeled clay chips that clink realistically as you bet. The cards are all pixel graphics, floating in a multicolor void that looks like an old MP3 player visualizer. There’s even a faux-CRT line grid over the whole thing, selling the simplicity of the game. The music and sound effects get the job done and are agreeable enough, though the game almost expects you to play with a podcast or audiobook in your ear.
I played on the Nintendo Switch, and while the handheld version had some disability accommodations, such as high-contrast card mode, it doesn’t quite go far enough, and after even a short session, I felt a bit of eye strain. The text in the game is quite small, and there isn’t an option to enlarge it or change the font, making it difficult to read at times. This is so far a minor nitpick in an otherwise engaging and engrossing pick up and play game.


Balatro is available on PC, Nintendo Switch, Xbox and Playstation consoles. It’s a tasty little gem, that might eat up more of your time than you expect. But what’s the harm in just one more run?

Hugh Likes Video Games: Bad Writer

August 21, 2023

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Bad Writer
Developed & Published by Riddle Fox Games
Available for PC and Nintendo Switch
Played on Nintendo Switch

The Skinny: The Waiting Game (abbreviated)
Created by one-man studio Riddle Fox Games, Bad Writer is a short game about short stories. This bite-sized pixelated story puts players in the shoes of Emily, an unemployed writer who sets out to follow her dreams of becoming a published author. Players will have a month to guide the character on the path to traditional publication. If she doesn’t get some sales, or becomes too depressed, she’ll go back to her old job and give up on her dreams forever.This simple, charming game only takes about a half an hour from start to finish and is laid out like Harvest Moon or Stardew Valley. The only stat players will have to manage is Emily’s happiness, which goes up when she talks to her wife or cat, or succeeds in her goals. It goes down when she gets a rejection or doesn’t write. If the gauge reaches zero, it’s game over.While simple and short, Bad Writer is very faithful to the life of a full-time author, and realistic in its depiction of the actual success rate of traditional submissions, even if it fast forwards through the actual writing and editing parts. It’s a wonderful, chill little gem to play if you want to learn what the writing life is like, or just want to procrastinate for an hour from your own writing.

Hugh Likes Video Games: The Cult of the Lamb

November 25, 2022

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Cult of the Lamb
Developed by Massive Monster
Published by Devolver Digital
Played on Nintendo Swtich


The Skinny: This is one animal you don’t want to cross.

With the rise in popularity of roguelikes, horror games, and cute animal life sims, it was only a matter of time before a developer combined all three.
 Much like SNES classic Actraiser, Cult of the Lamb alternates between simulation and action gameplay and does an excellent job of using the two modes to create a satisfying gameplay loop. The player is thrust into the role of The Lamb, sacrificed by The Bishops of the Old Faith, four dark gods who rule over a sinister forest full of adorable cartoon animals, like a theocratic Animal Crossing. But death is only the beginning, as you are chosen by their imprisoned sibling, The One Who Waits, to build a cult, slay the four bishops, and free him.
Gameplay consists of two phases. In roguelike action sequences, players attack the lairs of the four bishops fighting enemies, rescuing prisoners, and gaining supplies. The rewards feed into a management sections, in which you grow your cult in order to use their faith to empower your supernatural abilities in combat. Players can also explore the world, completing side quests and playing mini-games.
 The gameplay loop is challenging and satisfying, as you must balance your follower’ needs and venture out in the dark to find your enemies. If you neglect one, the other will suffer. Players need to go out to gain gold and other supplies, but if you neglect your cult, they will abandon you and you won’t have the required population levels to unlock later areas or the upgrades needed for end-game challenges.
 The game’s art reminds me of ‘Happy Tree Friends,’ Taking a light, cartoonish style and mixing it with some seriously messed up stuff. The cartoony nature sands the edges off of some of the more despicable actions you are able to take as cult leader. The game gives you a lot of options. Will you sacrifice your followers for a quicker boost in power or nurture them in order to gain more resources? It’s all fun and games until you summon that tentacle from the farthest planes of reality to crush their little bones.
Combat is challenging and intuitive and will be familiar to anyone who has played games like Hades or The Binding of Isaac.
While both parts of the game are fun and feed into each other well, both feel a little shallower than if the game were more tightly focused.
Cult of the Lamb is available for Steam along with major console eShops.

Hugh Likes Video Games: Unpacking

April 15, 2022

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Unpacking
Developed by Witchbeam
Published by Humble Games
Played on PC as a part of Xbox Game Pass

The Skinny – A relaxing game about stressful life events.

Unpacking is a relaxing, low-stress pixel art game about a stressful real-world activity: Moving. Each level consists of a number of boxes to unpack in increasingly large spaces. You start in a child’s bedroom and eventually have to unpack a whole house’s worth of possessions. Almost Tetris-like, the challenge is in finding the right place for every object, and making them fit in a limited space.Each object is a detailed isometric pixel sprite, which lends the game a bright and charming air. But the sound design is where the game really shines. There are unique, realistic sound effects for every individual item in the game. Placing a mug on a counter and opening a drawer sounds incredible in high-def. Which feels odd to say in a game review, but here we are. Sure, you don’t punch aliens or soar through the air on an airship, but did you hear the way that towel sounds when you fold it and put it on a shelf? The sound effect for when you fold up an empty cardboard box is the best dopamine hit I’ve gotten in a while from a game.I guess it’s a sign that I’m growing up. Which is fitting, as this is very much a game about transitioning through life. You follow a woman through multiple moves, from her first bedroom to her first college dorm, and beyond. Each level is framed as a page in a photo album, and completing the level gives you a line of text from the unnamed character as she thinks about that day.The objects are all suitably varied based on the rooms, and while it is a challenge to make them all fit, there isn’t really a score or a timer to beat. Certain combinations or placement of objects reward you with stickers which double as achievements, but there’s not much else other than that. There are some lovely hints of storytelling through the objects themselves, though. We get hints of who this person is, and what their life is like what her hobbies are, and how her life changes from move to move over the years. Crayons give way to fancy pens and to a drawing tablet as she grows up and pursues an art career. A cane and a wrist brace appear among the objects as time goes by. A photograph of two people has a pin placed through the one figure’s face following a breakup.Unpacking is a delightful and relaxing puzzle experience. It is available for PC and major consoles.

Hugh Likes Video Games: The Solitaire Conspiracy

March 18, 2022

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The Solitaire Conspiracy: A Mike Bithell Short
Developed by Bithell Games
Published by Ant Workshop
Played on Nintendo Switch

The Skinny: A tense, techno-espionage thrill built from a deck of cards.
Mike Bithell has some brilliant thoughts on game design and post/transhumanism. He’s also known for his tight, compact game design, compressing his point-of-view into tiny games. He made his mark with indie storytelling platformer Thomas Was Alone and cemented it with the robot detective game Subsurface Circular. His recent project The Solitaire Conspiracy mixes intense spy thriller action with an unlikely gameplay mechanic: a game of solitaire.
 Players fill the shoes of Spymaster, an analyst candidate tapped to save a shadowy spy network when a supervillain locks them out of their coordination software, C.A.R.D.S. Working with the last remaining analyst, it’s your job to coordinate scattered spy crews and get everything up and running, but in the world of spycraft, nobody can be trusted. 
 As you play through missions and rank up, you gain access to colorful crews of operatives, each with their own suit and special abilities. Face cards represent not only the faction but individual members of the team, and placing active cards uses their team power. This can be things like shuffling a stack or redistributing a suit or moving a card of a specific value or suit around. They are powerful twists on the game, but in fitting the theme, they can hinder you as much as help.
 The UX is where the game really shines, with the board appearing as a virtual space lit in the slick blacks and scintillating neon of a cyberpunk wonderland. The design made it a bit difficult to read at times, especially playing in handheld mode on the Switch. Fortunately, there is a zoom feature that makes everything a bit bigger and easier to see. The cool sci-fi colors, along with the pounding, synth-filled soundtrack, lends a tension to the game that traditional solitaire lacks. Missions add both flavor and drama to the gameplay. I frequently found myself playing just one more mission to reach the next rank and advance the story, or get the report on a thrilling mission.
 The Solitaire Conspiracy is a masterclass in design and proves that engaging storytelling and slick aesthetics can spice up even the most mundane gameplay mechanics. Like most Bithell games, there are only a few hours of the main story here, but they’re a thrill ride. The Solitaire Conspiracy is available for download from Steam, the Nintendo eShop, and the Xbox game store.

Hugh Likes Video Games: Eastward

March 4, 2022

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Eastward
Developed by Pixpil
Published by Chucklefish
Played on Nintendo Switch

The Skinny: An on-rails sci-fi story presented with a gorgeous pixelated aesthetic
Eastward is a beautifully rendered action RPG in pixelated graphics that doesn’t quite follow through on what it promises but is still a lot of fun. The game follows John and Sam, two refugees from a post-apocalyptic underground village as they travel by train on a quest to save the world and uncover the secrets of Sam’s burgeoning psychic powers. As they steam along, they fight their way through a series of linear, puzzle-filled dungeons and meet a huge cast of charming and wacky characters, but the chapter-based structure and frantic pace made the game feel a bit cramped and rushed.
 The game is broken into chapters, with the duo arriving in a new town, meeting the locals, and solving some dungeons before the plot pushes them back aboard their train to a new locale. The towns are probably the game’s best feature, with creatively designed and gorgeously rendered locations like a city built into the side of a dam and a film studio on rails filled with uplifted apes. Each is depicted with HD pixels in loving detail. The world is filled with faded advertisements and overgrown ruins. It is a testament to environmental design. I just wish I got to spend more time in each area before being pushed ahead. Towns are crammed full of mini-games, sidequests, and unique NPCs to talk to, and I always felt like I didn’t get enough time before being pushed ahead.
 The one mini-game that is always available is Earthborn, an in-world game that is a mix of turn-based RPG and rogue-like presented in a Gameboy aesthetic. It’s charming, and intersects with the story in interesting ways, but is ridiculously difficult.
 Dungeons are more linear than the sprawling towns and feature a mix of puzzle and combat. John has a variety of weapons that he gains over the adventure, starting with his trusty melee frying pan. Sam wields psychic energy to stun enemies or heal, but she can’t attack directly. Combat involves constantly switching between the two to keep hordes of enemies back in order to stay alive. Combat, which uses a Zelda-like formula, is clever, but fighting doesn’t feel as good as the puzzles.
 Eastward is a joy to look at and listen to, even if the gameplay isn’t quite as fun as the production. Still, it is well worth your time. You can pick up a digital copy via Steam or the Nintendo Switch eShop.

Hugh Likes Video Games: Toem

December 20, 2021

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Toem
Developed by Something We Made
Played on Nintendo Switch

The Skinny: A delightful little adventure about photography and community
Toem is a little gem of an indie adventure game about photography and perspective. This comforting little puzzle box is full of puzzles to solve, characters to help, and tiny locations to visit.
 Created by Swedish indie studio Something We Made, Toem only takes a few hours to play but is all about relaxation and comfort. Designed to be played in short bursts, it is the perfect game to wind down with at the end of the day or de-stress to over a coffee break as you take missions tracking down singing goats and finding the perfect spot to photograph a forest hotel.
 The game sets you in the shoes of a young photographer on an adventure to find the Toem, with no further explanation given. The tools at your disposal are your trusty camera and a very unusual public transit system that rewards public service with free rides. The game is divided into five zones, and at the start of each one, you’re given a public service card. As you explore a forest, a city, a seaside resort, and a mountain, you are given puzzles to solve in the form of requests of each area’s inhabitants. These can range from the simple, such as taking a photo of a requested subject, to the obtuse, such as recovering lost items or even restoring a power plant. After each puzzle, you are rewarded with a stamp on your card. Collect the requisite number of stamps, and you’re free to move along to the next area. But completionists will still have plenty of challenges to complete, animals to photograph, and hidden secrets to uncover beyond the game’s forgiving requirements.
 With one notable exception, Toem is presented in a charming black and white art style, and the small, isometric levels have a diorama-like quality. The characters are quirky, and a few of the puzzles are fiendishly clever, but I never felt stuck.
 Toem is a short and cozy experience that is perfect for unwinding by a roaring fire or relaxing with a hot cup of cocoa. If you’re looking for something to chill with at the end of the year, give this game a shot. Toem is available on PC from Steam and Epic, Nintendo Switch, and PS5.

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