This game was reviewed using Version 1.0.0j. Your experience on future versions may vary.

A funny and fun indie adventure game whose narrative depth betrays its cute exterior. Not very hard but not too easy, with a few simple accessibility features to ensure that basically anyone can see it through to the end. A delightful pixelated art style, silly characters, and diverse soundtrack help round out a largely pleasant experience. Though spending $15 for a 2-3 hour game may sound steep now, free content updates are on the horizon that should add more bang for your buck, so keep this one on your radar if you're still on the fence.

Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion is a comedy-focused action-adventure game in which a troublemaking turnip has been caught committing tax evasion and must now travel a land of sentient fruits and vegetables to try and clear his debt, learning more about the land and its inhabitants along the way. Despite its comedic focus, there is a surprising depth beneath its surface; and when combined with simple but fun gameplay, it makes for an overall pleasant experience.

• The game boasts a charming pixelated art style combined with a top-down perspective reminiscent of other iconic adventure titles like The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past--only if Link was a delinquent that ripped up everyone's valuable papers and casually committed financial fraud. Each locale is made more unique thanks to the diverse soundtrack, which helps make this relatively small world feel much more vast than it really is. It's also filled with a silly cast of characters that'll always keep you intrigued to see what each new person you meet has to say or what petty crime you'll unwittingly commit against them.
  
  
• Gameplay is a mixture of environmental puzzles and simplistic combat, with the occasional fusion of the two during boss battles. The puzzles aren't too difficult and start off rather simple, but introduce new elements at just the right pace to make things interesting about as soon as the ones you've been repeating start to get stale. Combat is simple almost to a fault, and difficulty really only stems from trying to fight multiple enemies at once or enemies that take a ton of hits to defeat. In my playthrough, I rarely went below half health and never got a game over from combat, but your mileage in may vary.
  
  
• For those with disabilities or inexperience that make combat in games difficult, Turnip Boy sports options to change player strength and even toggle god mode, stating in its menu that the game "was made to be played by as many people as possible."
  
  
• I can't say much on its story without spoiling it, but the direction it took surprised me, and it surpassed the admittedly low expectations I had for a game I largely expected to be focused more on its jokes than actually telling a story.

All in all, I had a lot of fun, and I only had a few minor gripes throughout:

• Swapping equipment could be made a little easier, perhaps with the use of dedicated buttons or mappable hotkeys/buttons for each piece of equipment (there are only a few right now), as the "pause and swap" method can be tedious and cycling through "quick swap" can be a bit disorienting in fast-paced situations.
  
  
• There is a dire need for a quest log and/or a full inventory menu, as the current inventory menus won't show you the quest items currently in your possession--only equipment and hats--which can make keeping track of side quest progress difficult.
  
  
• The humor can be very hit-or-miss, depending on your tastes. There's a lot of jokes that rely on pop culture references that (to me) won't age very well, but the jokes that stood on their own were the ones that more often got a laugh out of me, and I hope we get to see more of the latter in future updates.

Beating the game and completing it 100% only me took around 2 hours to accomplish, and that may not be enough for some to justify its current $15 price tag--something I've seen cited in most of the negative reviews, and something the developers have acknowledged. As of writing this, there are plans for free content updates in the near future which should help alleviate this problem, so don't write this one off completely based on that just yet. In its current state, Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion is a short but sweet little adventure game that I'm very glad I got to experience, and I'm excited to know that this isn't the last I'll be seeing of Turnip Boy in the future. I'll be waiting patiently to come back to the game once those updates are released, and I look forward to seeing what else the team at Snoozy Kazoo can put together.

For more game reviews, check out my Curator page!

[b][u]This game was reviewed using Version 1.0.0j. Your experience on future versions may vary.[/u][/b] [h3][b][u]Short Answer:[/u][/b][/h3] A funny and fun indie adventure game whose narrative depth betrays its cute exterior. Not very hard but not too easy, with a few simple accessibility features to ensure that basically anyone can see it through to the end. A delightful pixelated art style, silly characters, and diverse soundtrack help round out a largely pleasant experience. Though spending $15 for a 2-3 hour game may sound steep now, free content updates are on the horizon that should add more bang for your buck, so keep this one on your radar if you're still on the fence. [h3][b][u]Long Answer:[/u][/b][/h3] [i]Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion[/i] is a comedy-focused action-adventure game in which a troublemaking turnip has been caught committing tax evasion and must now travel a land of sentient fruits and vegetables to try and clear his debt, learning more about the land and its inhabitants along the way. Despite its comedic focus, there is a surprising depth beneath its surface; and when combined with simple but fun gameplay, it makes for an overall pleasant experience. [list] [*]The game boasts a [b]charming pixelated art style[/b] combined with a top-down perspective reminiscent of other iconic adventure titles like [i]The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past[/i]--only if Link was a delinquent that ripped up everyone's valuable papers and casually committed financial fraud. Each locale is made more unique thanks to the [b]diverse soundtrack[/b], which helps make this relatively small world feel much more vast than it really is. It's also filled with a [b]silly cast of characters[/b] that'll always keep you intrigued to see what each new person you meet has to say or what petty crime you'll unwittingly commit against them. [*]Gameplay is a mixture of environmental puzzles and simplistic combat, with the occasional fusion of the two during boss battles. [b]The puzzles aren't too difficult[/b] and start off rather simple, but introduce new elements at just the right pace to make things interesting about as soon as the ones you've been repeating start to get stale. [b]Combat is simple almost to a fault[/b], and difficulty really only stems from trying to fight multiple enemies at once or enemies that take a ton of hits to defeat. In my playthrough, I rarely went below half health and never got a game over from combat, but your mileage in may vary. [*][b]For those with disabilities or inexperience that make combat in games difficult, Turnip Boy sports options to change player strength and even toggle god mode[/b], stating in its menu that the game "was made to be played by as many people as possible." [*]I can't say much on its story without spoiling it, but the direction it took surprised me, and [b]it surpassed the admittedly low expectations I had for a game I largely expected to be focused more on its jokes than actually telling a story[/b]. [/list] All in all, I had a lot of fun, and I only had a few minor gripes throughout: [list] [*][b]Swapping equipment could be made a little easier[/b], perhaps with the use of dedicated buttons or mappable hotkeys/buttons for each piece of equipment (there are only a few right now), as the "pause and swap" method can be tedious and cycling through "quick swap" can be a bit disorienting in fast-paced situations. [*][b]There is a dire need for a quest log and/or a full inventory menu[/b], as the current inventory menus won't show you the quest items currently in your possession--only equipment and hats--which can make keeping track of side quest progress difficult. [*]The humor can be very hit-or-miss, depending on your tastes. [b]There's a lot of jokes that rely on pop culture references that (to me) won't age very well, but the jokes that stood on their own were the ones that more often got a laugh out of me[/b], and I hope we get to see more of the latter in future updates. [/list] [b]Beating the game and completing it 100% only me took around 2 hours to accomplish, and that may not be enough for some to justify its current $15 price tag[/b]--something I've seen cited in most of the negative reviews, and something the developers have acknowledged. As of writing this, there are plans for free content updates in the near future which should help alleviate this problem, so don't write this one off completely based on that just yet. [b][u]In its current state, [i]Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion[/i] is a short but sweet little adventure game that I'm very glad I got to experience, and I'm excited to know that this isn't the last I'll be seeing of Turnip Boy in the future.[/u][/b] I'll be waiting patiently to come back to the game once those updates are released, and I look forward to seeing what else the team at Snoozy Kazoo can put together. [quote]For more game reviews, check out my [url=https://store.steampowered.com/curator/42524563/]Curator page[/url]![/quote]