LITTLE HONU: A TURTLE'S TALE
Press kit · littlehonugame.com/press/

App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/id6783918882
Press contact: hello@littlehonugame.com
Developer: Deschutech LLC, Bend, Oregon


ABOUT LITTLE HONU

A tiny turtle, a big ocean. Little Honu is a retro pixel-art survival game for iPhone and iPad. You play a young honu, a juvenile green sea turtle, and every level is a crossing: scramble down one beach, thread the shore break, and swim the reef and the open blue to haul out on the next island. Crabs snap from the sand, seabirds dive from above, and sharks, hammerheads, giant trevally, an octopus and a monk seal hunt the water. Your turtle breathes, so ghost fishing nets are a real danger: swimming under one is safe, needing air under one is not. There is no level cap, and every crossing gets longer and meaner than the last.

Every level is free. There are no ads, no subscription, and nothing tracks you.


WHY I BUILT IT

I'm a software engineer, and when my daughter was five she asked me how video games are made. That is a hard thing to explain to a five-year-old, so we made one together instead.

The first version was built out of emojis. A turtle emoji swam up the screen and crab and shark emojis got in its way. It was the quickest way to show her that a game is a set of rules somebody decided on, and that she could decide some of them too.

Then it kept growing. The more we played, the more I wanted it to look like the games I grew up with: chunky pixels, a tiny hero, a big world, and one more try. So I swapped the emojis for pixel art and rebuilt it as a proper retro game, the kind I played as a kid, so I could share a little of my childhood with her.

The name came from her, too. Her grandpa in Hawaii calls her his little honu, the Hawaiian word for the green sea turtle, so the hero of her game was always going to be a turtle.

That's Little Honu. There are no ads in it and it collects nothing, because the first player it was made for was five.

  The developer, Deschutech


PRICING: FREE, NO ADS, NO SUBSCRIPTION

Free, $0
Every level, with no level cap. Easy and Medium difficulty, six turtle colours, Game Center leaderboards and achievements.

Full game, $1.99 once
Hard mode, a one-life hardcore run, plus the turtle upgrades your achievements earn.

Booster Pack, $0.99
Six of every booster, 24 in total. Boosters are barred from Hard, so the hardcore leaderboard is earned, never bought.


PRIVACY

The game has no accounts, no ads, no analytics and no third-party code of any kind. The App Store privacy label reads "Data not collected". Progress is saved on your own device.


FACTS

Platforms: iPhone and iPad (iOS 18 or later)
Genre: Arcade survival, retro pixel art
Price: Free, with optional one-time purchases of $1.99 (Full game) and $0.99 (Booster Pack)
Ads: None
Privacy label: Data not collected
Difficulty: Easy, Medium and Hard, each with its own Game Center leaderboard and achievements
Languages: English, French, German, Italian, Spanish (Spain and Latin America), Portuguese (Brazil), Russian, Japanese, Korean, Simplified Chinese
Age rating: 4+


REVIEW ACCESS

Writing about Little Honu? Email hello@littlehonugame.com and we will send a code that unlocks the full game.


IN THIS KIT

screenshots/    iPhone and iPad screenshots at full App Store resolution
key-art/        The title card with three phones, 1920 x 1080
logo/           The app icon at 1024 px and 512 px
press-kit.txt   This file

The 30-second trailer (1080p MP4) is a separate download on the press page.
