All joke, no punchline

We enjoy silly mischief simulators here at Pixel Die. Your goose games, your say-no-more-s, your goat sims, what have you. Sometimes you just crave an exceedingly stupid palate cleanser. Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion was that for many, a Zelda-adjacent parody game more interested in getting laughs out of its players via clever subversions and a punchy script. 

I didn’t really like it!

Here’s a peak behind the curtain: I have a page long draft for a Turnip Boy 1 review that we never published. It borders on scathing and I’m honestly not entirely sure why it got under my skin so much in hindsight. That said, I do want to share some of my conclusions from it for context. 

Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion plays like an old school parody flash game, with constant walking back and forth between NPCs trading items and not much else. When the game does present gameplay there’s very little to it. Despite being maybe 3 hours long it still feels like too much; too much walking, too much waiting, too much talking and not enough laughter even when it’s in its best moments. Turnip Boy Robs a Bank, to its credit, does not play like a Flash game. Instead it plays like Enter the Gungeon with a splash of Phantom Hourglass. And it’s fine. Again. But once again I’m left soured on the experience, because I am a joyless jerk.

This time we got a lot more game in our parody. TBRaB has you shooting and dodge rolling through the seemingly ever-expanding bank, then bailing when you run out of time, then blowing your ill-gotten gains on a wide range of upgrades. That’s a gameplay loop! We like those. For the first half or so of the game it’s even a damn good one. And then the game continues.

Each run consists of driving through the wall of the bank’s lobby and getting as much done as possible within the time limit before bailing. You’ll shoot increasingly hostile baddies as you advance through the bank, make some form of permanent progress be it beating bosses or progressing quests, then spend your ill-gotten gains on various stacking benefits back at the safehouse. It’s tried, tested, and functional in other games, which is why we see it lifted here.

Unfortunately TBRaB has a few hitches that eventually make the ride more bumpy than its influences. All extra areas are navigated to via randomized elevators. The doors are in the same places, but they won’t take you to the same areas each run. This means you may have accomplished everything a quest needs, but won’t see the relevant door to turn it in until a few runs from now. Additionally many of the upgrades break the game in unpleasant ways, the greatest offender being time increases that just let you accomplish anything you want in any given run, completely draining the tension from the game. Games like Half Minute Hero or Minit demonstrate the strength of short timed loops, but TBRaB instead just gives up on its own premise and lets you run it over once you throw around enough dosh.

Is the actual moment to moment play good? I mean, if you like Enter the Gungeon and don’t mind it being a bit worse it’s serviceable. Your dodge is wildly powerful, granting heaps of I-frames that’ll keep you alive in any fight. The guns themselves start pretty awful, and melee is even worse, but you’ll eventually unlock guns so gonzo they can practically win fights for you no matter how good your aim is. Once again the game starts tight and ends brainless. If this in and of itself was played for laughs in a game so loaded with meta elements I’d be more forgiving, but the game seems entirely self-unaware. By the end it asks you to chain several fights but with any and all challenge evaporated this is just an exercise in drudgery, especially since you have to run it again from scratch if you do happen to make a mistake.

There’s a lot of writing in this game, as there was in the first, and it’s equally mixed. Some jokes are clever and legitimately got me! Most are blatant references or just a stupid one-note character playing their singular note on repeat with about as much finesse as the soloist in The Jones Girl. The computer guy wants a body pillow. The old lady lime wants a divorce so she can hit the club. The grandma talks in UWU speak that I should be compensated for having to read. On and on and on. None of it meaningfully integrates with the actual gameplay in any way, almost as if the game’s mechanics were an afterthought.

I make a point of not spoiling games whenever possible, but it isn’t a spoiler to say this game stops on a note so sour it’ll make your entire body pucker. Note I said “stops”, not “ends”, because there’s barely an ending. I got the achievement for doing all the sidequests too (technically not a 100% because there’s apparently an uncollected hat somewhere but I’m not going back) so it’s not like I missed something critical; the game just doesn’t bother. The last game ended somewhat poorly and this one is somehow worse, almost as if they ran out of time or budget or both and just dropped the curtain.

I know dismantling this particular game makes me a killjoy. I don’t care. Much like the first entry, Turnip Boy Robs a Bank trips over its own roots and doesn’t even attempt to pass it off as a joke this time around. The mechanics don’t hold up for more than half of its total runtime, the lack of any narrative conclusion to its hours of setup is disappointing, and duffing it at achieving any sense of cohesion between its two halves again is indicative of failure from all parties involved. I guess money really can’t buy happiness.

4/10