THE SEED
Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion is a top-down puzzly hack-n-slash game in the style of old-school Zelda games. It's also kind of gorgeous, in a pixelated, soft, painterly way. If you're terrible at those sorts of games, take heart! There's a "god mode" difficulty option just for you!
As one can surmise, you play as Turnip Boy - an anthropomorphized turnip - a man of few words. The titular Tax Evasion takes place within the first seconds of the game, when you the player tear apart your overdue tax notice - mutely calling out a "fuck the system" that you'll continue to embody throughout the game. There's corruption afoot, and that corruption will wilt beneath your beady-eyed, vacant stare of justice.
That said, you need to get powerful first. Starting off, your only ability is to trip and fall over. For most of the game, you're performing errands for the mayor of your vegetable town, since you owe lots of unpaid taxes. You're an efficient but objectively terrible assistant, driven by a problem with authority you can only express through violence.
THE FIBROUS CRUNCH
You quickly find a weapon and a watering bucket, the two tools that you'll use most through the game's puzzling and hack-n-slashery. There are other abilities you'll learn, but most of the mechanics relate to watering plants and/or poking things with your weapon.
You also rip up documents. All the documents. You can't not rip up documents. Some of them aren't really bad documents, either. But you rip them up anyway. I was (much like said documents) a bit torn over this. Extending that sad pun a bit further, it seems plausible that your character isn't "Turnip Boy" at all - but "Torn-up" Boy ...since you to rip up so many documents. ...I'll move on.
TBCTE was a surprisingly deep game - I didn't really expect the tax evasion element to foreshadow anything, but it does. I didn't really expect the simplistic nature of many NPCs to foreshadow anything, but it does. There's a sinister mystery behind the game's placid town, and a history that the game repeatedly hints at in ways that only make sense toward the end. I don't want to spoil them here.
THE SATISFYINGLY NUTRITIOUS FINISH
There's a surprising number of things to do when the game is complete. There's a feline advisor who will help you find any missing (unshredded) documents. There's a sort of secondary boss battle at the end, unlocked only when you've found all those documents. There's also a cool train that serves as a sort of "infinite battle" system, with its own boss (and secondary boss) contained within it. There are many hats.
Even so, I sort of wish that TBCTE had been a bit longer; it would have been neat to see a couple more areas/bosses squeezed into the middle of the game to stretch it out a bit. I don't often say that, but the game definitely wrapped up before I was quite ready to say goodbye. That's hardly a bad thing to say about an indie game though; mostly it means that I'll be keeping an eye on Snoozy Kazoo to see what their next game looks like. I'll definitely check it out.
I give Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion nine compulsively-ripped-government-documents out of ten.
I give Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion nine compulsively-ripped-government-documents out of ten.
