Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion Review (Steam)

Summary

Turnip Boy is a game that is instantly pleasing to the eye, very much a pixelated game harking back to games like Zelda. The game is an adventure game at its core and you have to find items for characters and return them for rewards, the ultimate goal is to pay off your debt of tax fraud and clean the slate with the town Mayor. As you play you will get visible roadblocks that require certain weapons or abilities in order to pass. It’s all very safe and straightforward in its goal, navigating the world is fine but you get no map so it does require a lot of map memory. The characters you meet are charming, rude, or funny and they have dialogue that changes depending on the current task you are doing. Turnip Boy has simple hack and slashes combat with a minor emphasis on puzzles. I enjoyed the initial few hours of the game but for me, it started to repeat the tasks, it’s a lot of fetch quests, and progress outside of the tasks is to find anything made of paper and rip it up, it just got very samey and even the boss battles were not that engaging. It annoys me when I think back because I hammered the game hardcore and got to the final set of tasks but I hit a wall hard, boss encounters were infuriating and it all got too much. I’m not sure what the game is going for gameplay-wise, the story is very meme filled with the current world issues and jokes but that’s all it really has. I didn’t come away liking the game and instead found it tiring, repetitive, and telegraphed. Overall Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion is a game that relies on wit and memes to gloss over the tired gameplay.