Turnip Boy Robs A Bank continues the felonious vegetable's goofy crime spree
Despite not having hands, Turnip Boy picks up a gun to join the heist of a lifetime in the recently released Turnip Boy Robs a Bank. It's the second game from developer Snoozy Kazoo, and the sequel to another felony outing by a root vegetable in Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion. Both games are strange, often hilarious romps, with their eponymous protagonist cluelessly navigating a strange world of anthropomorphic vegetables and evil, document-wielding authority figures.
As you might guess from a title like Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion, Snoozy Kazoo's games aren't the most serious you've ever played. As the studio's founder Yukon Wainczak explained via email, the character first came to life during a game jam. Wainczak said inspiration struck when he spotted a turnip at a Walmart and thought, "wow, that's a dumb vegetable." Turnip Boy was born.
Comedy infuses both the Turnip Boy games in their writing and design. The tax evasion of the first story results from Turnip Boy's compulsive shredding of all paper documents that come his way. After failing to understand and then ripping up his tax bill, he's apparently shocked (Turnip Boy never actually speaks, so it's anybody's guess) to learn that his house has been repossessed, forcing him to go on a long quest to help out the mayor to get it back. It's possibly the goofiest call to adventure a hero has ever received.
Bosses in both games include murderous food items like a cyborg radish and a militant side of fries, and mutated animals like a cat that is somehow also a rotten apple thanks to strange interactions with some mysterious radioactive goo. The stories also include gags of all kinds, including some that draw from the real world, with jokes about game development, life online, and cryptocurrency.
"We see the games we make as a reflection of ourselves in some ways," Wainczak said via email. "When we were creating Tax Evasion, a lot of the humor came from a place of us not really understanding taxes or the real world ourselves! We were starting Snoozy, graduating from college, and the adulting world just seemed nonsensical and chaotic, which we channeled into the game. Turnip Boy Robs a Bank is similar in the fact that things we see in the real world are silly or nonsensical and it tends to slip into the game."
But while the two games share a world, a main character, and a commitment to comedy, Snoozy Kazoo leaps between genres from one game to the next. They gave players something very different in Robs a Bank than they found in Tax Evasion.
Wainczak said that in approaching the sequel, they wound up taking such a different tack because the team wasn't really interested in retreading the same ground again.
"We are not a big fan of sequels in the usual sense," he said. "We didn’t want to just create more of Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion, we wanted the gameplay to change with the vibe of the story as well."
The first Turnip Boy game shares DNA with dungeon-crawling action-adventure games like The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. "Juegos de 20" While it has some hack-and-slash gameplay, it's a breezy experience that often puts its focus on solving puzzles as you work your way through its story.
Tax Evasion's Zelda vibes extend to its combat and gameplay, with Turnip Boy using a sword at close range against fairly simple foes. Tougher fights usually involve the game's engaging puzzle ideas, like using a watering can to grow bomb flowers you can then kick at enemies, or dropping portals to zip around the battlefield, but the game is never trying to be especially complex.
Most of the fun of Tax Evasion comes from exploring the world, talking to its many inhabitants, and helping them with their problems. There are lots of characters with side quests to complete, but they also keep things light. They mostly require you to bring objects from one character to another so they can drop some jokes about influencers, black-market wood, and murdering unsuspecting snails who haven't paid their share of the rent.
Some of the feedback from players of Tax Evasion, Wainczak said, was that gameplay was "a little lackluster compared to the story." With Robs a Bank, the team took the feedback as a challenge, aiming to create a more balanced experience which turned out to be "a breath of fresh air."
"Gameplay was always a point of critique from the first game," he said. "It's not something you can really dig your teeth into. The story and humor was something people seemed to really enjoy from the first game. We tried to create an experience that balanced both gameplay, story, and humor! We also wanted to explore more of Turnip Boy’s mafioso history, which was something we only touched briefly on in the first game."
It turned out that the developers found themselves much more at home with their approach in Turnip Boy Robs a Bank, Wainczak explained. Where there was more of a learning curve as the team learned how to design puzzles that were challenging without being frustrating, the roguelike gameplay of the sequel felt like a more natural fit.
Robs a Bank is a fast and intense top-down shooter, with a quicker pace, roguelite elements, and a whole mess of guns and enemies. Instead of a more open adventure where you gain access to new areas as you unlock abilities, you make repeated, short runs into the Botanical Bank to grab all the loot you can. You pick up and shake down hapless vegetables to grab their pocket change, cut open safes, and slip past laser sensors to make it to vaults—but you have only a few minutes to escape with your haul before alarms sound and the bank fills with the (peach) fuzz, SWAT peppers, and nightstick-wielding strips of bacon.
You start with a pistol, but there are all sorts of weird weapons to discover within the bank, from lasers to bubble cannons to devil pitchforks that fling fire. Carrying those weapons out of a run lets you continue to use them, or recycle them to unlock better permanent weapons such as a submachine gun and a grenade launcher.
Finding weapons in the bank and spending your loot on upgrades lets you get farther and farther into the bank and uncover more of its secrets. Robs a Bank adds other roguelite elements to keep things fresh as well—the layout of much of the bank is static, but elevators will take you up to random additional levels that hide combat challenges, side quests, and opportunities for more larceny. Thanks to those differences, Robs a Bank can provide a lot more challenge in its short runs, while also delivering the things that work well in Commits Tax Evasion, like side quests with quirky characters and lore that illuminates more of its weird world.
Turnip Boy Robs a Bank never quite pushes to the difficulty level of similar games like Hotline Miami, or of "bullet hell"-style games. Overall, it's still a fairly casual experience.
With both games being so different, you're free to choose the Turnip Boy experience that most appeals to you. If you'd rather have a light dungeon-crawling story experience, go with Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion. For something more combat-heavy and playable in short bursts, Turnip Boy Robs a Bank is at the ready.
But to best understand this veggie world, its governmental structure, and its criminal underbelly, you'll definitely want to follow this goofy vegetable's adventures from beginning to end.
Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion and Turnip Boy Robs a Bank are both available now on the Epic Games Store.