Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion
Year: 2021
Rating: E10+
Time Played: ~2 hours
Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion is one of those games that got me to play it based on the name alone. That it also only took up two hours of my time was also a plus. A cutesy action-adventure, Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion is just silly enough to not be taken seriously, but not absurd enough to be ultimately funny. I definitely played through it shortly after adding it to my vast video game library, but I also was glad that it was a free game I got as part of my Amazon Prime subscription.
As an action-adventure title, there are easy comparisons to The Legend of Zelda games, as well as the Metroidvania genre here. You collect items in dungeons that you need to defeat that dungeon’s boss and advance to the next part of the map. Where successful versions of these games succeed is by making it clear what needs to be done next after an objective is accomplished. Unfortunately, there were several times during my play-through of this game when I was wandering around, trying to talk to everyone and figure out where I needed to go next to advance the story.
I’ll admit that the concept of the main character committing tax fraud is funny, but it never really goes any further than that. What was more striking were the moments that had something deeply sinister hiding in the subtext. You could easily label this game “post-apocalyptic” and it would fit. All this being said, some of the controls felt a little loose, which led to me dying more than I would have liked for a game that was still fairly simple to beat.
A simple action-adventure game with bizarre undertones, I give Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion 3.0 stars out of 5.
