I once read a crossword setter writing about his craft. He said a cryptic should take no longer than an hour to set, and he had decided this because he thought they should take no longer than an hour to solve. I can easily spend an afternoon and more struggling over a cryptic, but that’s besides the point: I’ve always liked the balance of what he’s suggesting. An hour to set, an hour to play. Done.
Turnip Boy Commits Tax EvasionPublisher: Graffiti Games, Plug In DigitalDeveloper: Snoozy KazooPlatform: Played on Xbox and SwitchAvailability: Out now on PC, Switch and Xbox (Game Pass, available on smartphones this month.
It rarely works that way with video games, I suspect. And this has rarely been more obvious than when I sat down to play Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion this afternoon. Here is a top-down Zelda-alike, I had been told, that I could see off in an hour or two. And it was true – two hours and done, although there was plenty left to go back to. I felt slightly bad about it, though. I suspect Turnip Boy took a relative age to put together.
I should say this now: it’s a wonderful game, witty, playful, and scrupulously true to Zelda traditions. You’re a turnip with a huge tax bill, and so you set out across a compact world to get yourself out of trouble.
I won’t spoil the plot, but the pleasure of these games lies with familiarity, I think, and there’s a lot of familiarity outside of the plot. Fetch quests, bosses that break up the adventuring, dungeons, mazes, items that allow you to access places you could see but couldn’t get to before. All that wonderful jazz.