My hear-me-out game of the year. Very creative stacker game where you make boxes to feed cakes to cute hungry creatures.
Alright, I need you to hear me out on this one:
Turbo Fat joins Tetrachroma to make my now-existing List Of Indie Titles That Show A Creative Spin On The Tetris Gameplay To Make Something Unique And Fun For About A Fiver. It sounds specific, but this is the second of three games released Q4 2024 that fit this description (the third one being Hot Wax, available on itch.io at the time of writing). I was shown this game by a friend when it got released, and wanted to play it for myself, said friend ended up gifting me the game before I convinced myself to buy it, and I’ve been hooked ever since. If you can get past the fact that this game is called what it is, and that being good at the game will have you you feed creatures making them big and round, you will find a very cute, very silly block stacker game inspired by the ideas of Square Tetris as seen in Tetris Worlds or The New Tetris, yet polished a ton into being its own thing.
Instead of having the usual Tetris pieces, you usually only get the L shapes, squares and T pieces, as well as complementary pieces to make easy 3×3 squares. The pieces are colour coded as well to help identify which fit together, however you can also fit them together in larger 3×4 or 3×5 boxes, being worth a lot more, especially when made horizontally – which, trust me, is a lot harder to do consistently. Another important part of the scoring is the combo system, which goes up by every line you clear, is continued on making boxes, and only breaks on the second piece drop that fails to do either. This leniency lets infinite combos happen, but doesn’t make them trivial either, and are super rewarding to go for – the game also rewards you with a couple steam achievements if you can get a 100 line combo. The other flagship mechanic of this game is the Squish move, which lets you drop a piece through other blocks as long as there is an unobstructed column between where you start and where you end. The controls of the game also feel buttery smooth, with a lot of tech and subtleties like initial movement, or a small buffer to prevent the game feeling like it’s dropping your inputs. There are also a couple options to make the game more accessible, allowing you to tune the game speed, enable the ability to hold a piece for later, or adding line pieces to the piece pool to help with clearing your board. Changing any of those options doesn’t prevent story progress or achievement unlocking, so if the game is too frustrating to play they are considered fair game to use. All of those combine nicely into a quite permissive game that feels nice to play.
The story starts with your little creature waking up from a dream where someone was teaching them to cook, becoming a renowned and successful chef. You then go on to look for this person, who turns out to be Turbo aka. Fat Sensei, and after convincing them to help you out, the two of you start a restaurant franchise, which after a couple misunderstandings ends up being named Turbo Fat. The game then follows the two of you as you overcome various challenges – both in story and in gameplay – to become a moderately successful restaurant chain. The writing of the story is very daft, and a decent amount of the humour consists of either Turbo being a mean old git, or from your customers or yourself being very silly. It’s most definitely not a style for everyone but I personally had fun going through the story. The story missions gameplay wise though are quite creative, with either more gimmicks being introduced or some interesting puzzles being thrown your way. Most stages feel more about coming up with the right strategy for the task than playing the game fast, which is super refreshing to see.
Presentation-wise, the game has this very cute and bubbly artstyle where everything is cute and squishy. Your pieces are made of bread, fruit, chocolate or cream, which combine together into the boxes you make to create appropriately flavoured cakes and snacks. Every character you see, from your own to literally everyone in the story cutscenes, uses the same character creation system, which helps your character fit in with the rest of the world and people in it. One of the values in the character properties is a “Fatness” number, which the game loves to use to make your customers get bigger as you keep feeding them cakes, or as they keep coming to your restaurant in the story cutscenes. The music is pretty good, some tracks do feel a bit “default FL studio plugins” but that’s probably only something I notice because I dabbled in FL Studio earlier in my life.
Oh, and if you see this little dragon eagerly waiting for your best cakes…
… that’s me saying hi :3
Anyway, all and all, this is a very good and creative block stacker, and if you like creative takes on Tetris gameplay, I can’t recommed this enough. Thanks again to my friend letting me know this existed and gifting me a copy, I will never get those 30 hours of my last week back.
Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2213410 £4.99
itch.io: https://poobslag.itch.io/turbo-fat Free to play (Online+Download)
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