OK, first off: go play Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion. It’s cheap, it’s not that long, and I promise you’re going to have a riot of a time with the whole thing. I’m going to be spoiling it all rotten, and it’s much more fun when you don’t know what you’re in for.
So now that you’re back here, or if you’ve already played it: wow, right? That was pretty unexpected, and fun, and honestly kind of heartfelt! When I finished this little game, it didn’t change my life or make me reconsider my values, but it did make me think that, huh, I’ve never really played a game quite like this before. Sure, I’ve played games with a lot of comedy, and games whose entire purpose is to be a joke, but I don’t think I’ve played a game where the real meat of it is the comedy and nothing else. Turnip Boy has some light puzzles and combat, but it’s mostly window dressing for the real purpose of the game, which is making you laugh at this strange and irreverent world you’re exploring. I cannot think of many games that do this, where the comedy is the entire game. No real mechanics to explore, nothing to latch onto besides the tools given to explore and interact with the jokes at hand. That is… pretty cool, I think! It’s something worth considering. We all know about comedic games, but what about games where the comedy itself is the entire game?
I want to draw a line here to define what I’m talking about, namely, what is the difference between a game that is funny and a game that is about comedy? We can all think of a game where humor is present: Borderlands comes to mind for me, a looter shooter game where the characters constantly crack jokes and wacky scenarios are played out for you to experience. That way I described it, though, that’s the thing, as “a genre of game that is funny”. Because for these sorts of games, you describe your primary or equal amounts of engagement as something other than the comedy. I am playing Borderlands for a looter-shooter gameplay loop as much as or just as more than for the comedy, if that makes sense. Very few games rely solely on comedy as the main thing driving almost all the focus, and most of them use comedy as an external element to the core driving force of the game that is usually mechanical. That’s fine, to be sure: I’m just being descriptive here. It is simply far rarer that the entire game is in service to telling jokes, however, and it does make some sense as to why. If you’re going to dedicate an interactive experience entirely to something in script, at that point, it might seem easier to make comedy in other artforms. Games are usually inspired and driven by some sort of mechanical engagement, and it is a lot harder to drive an interactive experience with something less concrete such as comedy. There are some great examples out there, still! I bet you all laughed like hell at Goat Simulator, a game where a physics engine and disconnected game objectives combined to create incredible amounts of humor. Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion sticks out a little, however, because of how focused and linear it is. The jokes are carefully delivered and paced. It’s a standup comedy routine in game form. So how does it being a game matter, then?
Turnip Boy is interesting to me because of how it uses the video game format to deliver the jokes and comedy. It is inextricably tied into the format of being a game in how it presents and delivers all the jokes. The game will turn fetch quests into setup and punchline for a joke, or will simply make the design of a simple boss a joke in and of itself. There’s an entire sequence where the dark punchline of irradiating one of the last surviving humans is built up throughout an entire basic dungeon sequence. Punchlines and absurdities also come out through the mechanics. Watering and throwing bomb flowers is a minor mechanic throughout the whole game, turned around in the final boss as you chuck them at your allies to propel them into a divebomb! This absurdity wouldn’t work without the proper setup as a minor mechanic earlier. It is really interesting how, yes, the primary goal of this game is to deliver jokes, but the jokes are formatted through the medium of being a game. They embrace the format and use the conventions and reality of interactivity in order to guide every joke in some way. Some jokes need player involvement, others mock the very medium, and the main plot as a whole is a riff on the idea of the simple joke game, starting as simple and funny and spiraling out into an absurdly complex backstory for the entire world you’re in. This simply wouldn’t work as a couple hour comedy movie or standup session, when so much of the conceit and delivery is completely reliant on it being a game or the player interacting with the game. It’s a really fun showing as to how games can deliver structured comedy, not reliant on emergent systems, but instead utilizing the medium and aspects of it to make for a really fun and engaging couple hours of laughter.
What makes all this so interesting is, to me, how disinterested the game is in using any mechanics to engage the player. In a polite way, the gameplay and interaction of Turnip Boy is extremely shallow and boring. Competently made, sure, but nothing you’d really get engaged with. It’s all this way because the game doesn’t want any pretensions about what these are for. The mechanics are a delivery mechanism for comedy, in the end, and it’s best that they not be, especially for the sake of pacing. Imagine if a player got stuck on a demanding boss or puzzle, and how that’d destroy the fun pace of the joke delivery? The pacing benefits and focus make it worth it, but that’s a big ask from the audience to buy in, and a big risk for the game devs to take frankly. It’s not something you see most games do because most people expect some form of deeper interaction or engagement in terms of mechanical reflex in a game, with the “secondary” elements like story or tone as backdrop. But there’s a lot of value to just focusing entirely on the jokes and the general absurdity. Comedy in games can go a lot further than simply being a backdrop supporting some mechanical engagement, and can indeed become the primary driver. Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion is the video game equivalent of a standup comedy routine, like I said, but that doesn’t quite do it justice. It’s a comedy routine completely adapted and molded into a form that perfectly suits this different medium. Yeah, it’s goofy fun, to be sure, but from a wider view, it should also make us take note of how much fun interactive comedy can be.
I’ve hopefully convinced you that this game shows how much fun it can be to have some inventive and creative linear comedy, but I also just want to express how good it is on its own merits, because god, I loved the experience that this game was. It was so comfy and relaxing to go through, and made me laugh out loud so many times, wondering how it would one-up itself and then being pleasantly surprised at how it always did. It feels like such an honest and open experience too, without a hint of irony or smug distance. When the game finally became open about the secret dark backstory of humanity being wiped out by nuclear bombs, the game still plays it as part of a goofy world, just another layer of absurdity. There’s no sense that it wants to subvert anything or show how edgy it can be, and instead it just wants to create an absurd and dark world that’s still ultimately goofy at heart. It doesn’t devalue the silly and goofy, and instead thinks that both subversive and wacky comedy can be fun in tandem, which it absolutely is. I also love that it’s not coy about the fact that it does have a message, about how ridiculous many systems that humanity has created can be, shown through how they’re imposed on these sentient plants. There are so many comedic stories that coach the inevitable messaging a story will have to give in deniability, and this game is just like, nah, obviously our jokes mean something, it’ll just roll with it. In a world where so many “subversive” stories try to act like nothing matters and happy kind stories aren’t worth it, it’s really nice to laugh with a game that doesn’t believe in any of that, you know? It’ll be weird and dark but it’ll never act like that happy veneer it gives off is worthless. And oh, that lovely little ending track, that’s such a perfect way to end it all, and to really sum it up. This was a goofy, heartfelt, wacky, and dark comedy that it seems like everyone had fun making, and they want to share in that with you. I often tend to wax poetic about what a game could mean to us, or how it could make us think about the medium. I’ve done that here with this game, to be sure. But man, on some basic level, this silly, short game just made me smile a lot more than most other games ever have. It just made me happy on this basic level! It has more to it than that, but not a lot of games can make me feel just completely satisfied with having experienced a really nice thing that someone made.
Beyond gushing, though, if you do want to take something from this silly game: comedy games don’t have to be as they commonly are. If you google “comedy games” right now, you’ll get mostly the kind of game I mentioned earlier, games that have comedy as a backdrop. That is of course, perfectly fine, but we shouldn’t pigeonhole our thinking into this. There is so much more room for games like Turnip Boy, and it should make us think that, wow, this kind of thing really can be done in a fun and endearing way. This is not a life-changing game, but frankly, that’s why it made me smile so much. It’s so meaningless in the grand scheme, but it made me smile a lot, and made me think a lot about games and comedy. I want to see a lot more finely crafted linear laugh-fests, you know? They can still 100% take complete advantage of the medium in a lot of inventive ways, they can be a relaxing way to spend an evening, and they give a platform for a much different kind of creativity in the medium. An example that executes on all this so well, that’s the kind of inspiration I love to see and just makes me happy. It’s a goofy, silly joke game, and we could all use more of those with some real creative vision and joy in our lives. I know it made my day much, much better.
Thanks very much to my lovely patrons, and a very special thanks to Acelin, Cynamon, emma space, Jane Wick, Kelli Mariella K, Margarida Silva, MerrylBerryl, Modnar, Shaun Adarkar, Sinon Lynx, and Zachary Griesbach.
If you like what you’ve read, consider donating to me on Patreon and joining these lovely people. Thanks for reading!
The Library 