TURNIP BOY COMMITS TAX EVASION does comedy better than most movies

Comedy games always feel like they have some kind of caveat. “Good for an hour.” “Funny but annoying.” “Brilliant but repetitive.”

I always root for comedy games, but how can they compete with the bulkier Dramatic RPGs or Cinematic Platformers propped up by entire supporting teams of writers and producers well-versed in decades of dramatic films and centuries of excellent literature that all contain a blueprint on how to Land The Plane? The fact of the matter is that they can’t; the deck is stacked against them. But every so often a game comes along that blows all the competition out of the water, heightening comedy at a perfect cadence, all the while avoiding jumping the shark in the end like a Ben Stiller movie. It takes something with a rich premise like Untitled Goose Game or Goat Simulator, but invests in the narrative components of its structure to make it a full-fledged experience with an incredible payoff. This is a tall order, but when a comedy game pulls it off, it becomes some peoples’ Favorite Videogame, such as The Stanley Parable.

There’s another game ready to be in that hall of fame: Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion.

Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion, for the uninitiated, is an indie game about a boy who is a turnip, and he commits tax evasion. While its gameplay as a 2D dungeon crawler, i.e Zelda, is quite simple, the narrative has never left my memory, which is saying something for a game released in 2020 (a normal year where nothing interesting happened). The game came to mind recently because its sequel, Turnip Boy Robs a Bank, was released this spring. While Bank is also very funny, the brilliant team at Snoozy Kazoo chose to focus on gameplay over narrative this time around, completely changing genres and doing it incredibly well. Turnip Boy Robs a Bank is a gun-wielding run-based game that is quite addictive and provides a beautifully short-yet-rewarding gameplay loop. Snoozy Kazoo should be incredibly proud of this genre-hopping feat. Bank is a gameplay-game, however, and this is a narrative-newsletter, so we will be focusing on the first game, Tax Evasion. To put it academically: this game fucking slaps. 

To start, Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion is two hours long. That is not a typo: it is two hours long and has not aged a day when played in Space Year 2024. This immediately makes it Perfect, 10/10, No Notes, and if I didn’t feel like I needed to shout about how good it is from the rooftops, I would end this piece here and go back to recovering from jaw surgery (I am fine, it was planned, thank you for asking). The game begins with the simplest of openings: you, Turnip Boy, are presented with an outrageously high tax bill, just Animal-Crossing-style unpayable, and you are given two choices:  “read” and “tear it up.” Choosing “read” does not progress the story, and so thus begins the journey of the Turnip Boy who is caught committing tax fraud and must do favors for the corrupt Mayor Onion, revealing that Turnip Boy can only ever do three things: tear up any paper given to him (whether it is something priceless or something trivial), say “yes” to all requests, and fight. This is so simple and so funny on that Norm Macdonald guttural level where your body feels the joke before you can even process it. It’s the Bizarro Bill Maher. It is beauty.

The premise feels like a WarioWare style microgame. Even if this act of tearing up a paper was all you did, it would already be satisfying, in the way that those Newgrounds / Nitrome Flash games of yesteryear that were instantly entertaining (and became the bane of all classrooms with computers in the mid-aughts). But Turnip Boy goes beyond the calling of these short, punchy, punk-song-duration games and figures out how to make the joke last long enough to create an even stronger punchline after a full narrative – something outrageously difficult to do.

For every longform masterpiece like The Good Place and The Regime, there are four thousand Monty Pythons and Judd Apatows. This is not to say that Monty Python and Apatow are bad; on the contrary, they’re both mandatory viewing and both have had incredible jokes that built this personality that I inflict on people every day. But both of these artists are also famous for being unable to sustain high-concept comedy for long, opting to end in either an out-of-the-blue dance number, or to have every character get unfathomably depressed. There’s a reason Monty Python started out as a sketch team: the length of a sketch is the natural lifespan of most jokes.

This is because a joke should not be taken apart. It is funny and then gone, into the ether. For a joke to stick around, you must either repeat it ad nauseum like a recurring sketch show character such as SNL or Catherine Tate, or you must dive into the reality of the joke, investigating the old Upright Citizens Brigade mantra: if this is true, what else is true? And finding the joy in a joke’s reality is not simple and for long parts of the process, not fun. It is the act of constantly threading a needle of discovery and craft simultaneously, which will require dead-serious moments in the story. Comedy is tragedy with time, so if you want to have both comedy (jokes) and time (longform narrative), you must include tragedy as well (the achilles heel of Monty Python), but never to the detriment of the spirit of the original joke (the achilles heel of Apatow). And Tax Evasion, amazingly, pulls this off, which is even more surprising given its simplistic cartoon art.

Speaking about why this works will require spoiling the game, and there’s nothing worse than someone giving away the punchline of a joke, so this is the part where those of you who haven’t played it head out, purchase it, as it’s available on every platform, and then come back later today after finishing the very short game. OK, the reasonable price of $15 is too much for you monsters? It’s available on PS4 and PS5 for 5 bucks at the time of this publishing, unless you have PS+, then it’s 3 and a half. It is, again, shorter than most movies, so go on. 3, 2, 1, bake! 

There, glad to see you again. It was good, right? After reading this, please spend the twenty minutes necessary to get every item, which is how you will arrive at the absurd final ending. It is both brilliant and necessary to understand the game’s sequel.

Back to why Tax Evasion works so well and hits so hard: the reality of the joke is fully explored. This is done by answering the question that is planted in the audience’s unconscious when seeing a world of various anthropomorphised fruits and vegetables: “Why fruits and vegetables? Why not people?” Most of us don’t think this consciously, as we’re too busy being entertained by the many jokes that parody the Zelda-like fetch quest, thinking “this is fun and silly, I’ll play until it inevitably runs out of steam in 20 minutes or so.” All the same, the question is suggested by the nature of the world itself. So in order for the story to keep going, that question will have to be organically brought up by a character in the story before you run out of patience. Eventually, we get the answer, which is that humans destroyed the world with nuclear warfare, and the radiation led to sentient vegetables. Even better, you as the player must spend time in that truth, reading the diary entries of people who have felt terror and fear in this world they have made, leading to you murdering one of these last surviving human beings in existence. All of this is accomplished within minutes before you head back to the surface and resume the very silly main adventure, which stays within the tone initially set at the beginning.  

That is brilliant. It is acrobatics and gymnastics of efficiency and storytelling. The gut punch of seeing the stark reality that has created the world we were enjoying is exactly what the story needed in order to exist without going off the rails. As soon as you’re hit with the terror, you don’t wallow in it. Instead, you’re back to the main story and the game rockets towards its finale. For this to work, the creators had to listen to the will of the story and let it grow of its own accord, and did not try to milk the moment to make it last longer than it should have. That is what all of us should be doing when we make something.

The funny thing is that we are surrounded by forever games and multi-film franchises that are meant to last far longer than they were ever supposed to. Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion did such a good job at getting in, doing their job, and getting out, that I now will buy whatever Snoozy Kazoo makes. Everyone: just make something good. We will want more from you.