It is probably too high a bar to compare Turnip Boy to classic top-down Legend of Zelda, though that would feel like the obvious comparison. It never sticks the landing and the adventure game aspects feel distinctly half-baked.

Early LoZ adventures are well-known for their emphasis on both combat and puzzle sequences, but Turnip Boy does neither of these metrics competently. The puzzles are very simple to figure out, and completing the longer sequences is consequently more tedious than satisfying. The combat feels like a downright afterthought as well. Bosses usually incorporate the latest item and puzzle mechanics in Zelda fashion, but the enemy patterns are simple and the AI and pathing are absymal. All you have to do is just wait for a boss to stand still and then smack it a bunch of times rather than doing what the game actually wants you to do.

The game is really just a series of fetch quests in order to move forward the story and obtain collectables. You will mainly be interacting with various NPCs, reading through quirky dialogue, picking up an item, backtracking through the map and repeating that process to open up more parts of the overworld.

Unfortunately, the dialogue is the worst part about this game by far. It is hard to explain how excrutiating it is, but the best way I can describe it is as if the Borderlands 2 writing team was staffed by people who grew up on pre-2016 Tumblr and Undertale. I don't understand how, in 2021, the developer thought it would be funny to have just one of the NPCs do the entire Navy Seals copypasta. However, that seems to be the caliber of "humor" in this game.

Consequently, the closest Zelda title this actually resembles is Super Flash Bros' unofficial fangame The Legend of Zelda and the Lampshade of No Real Significance (2005). Lampshade was a Flash game where the aim was also focused on doing fetch quests to progress the game and followed the exact same formula. It also had the same focus on off-beat humor, but the dialogue of Lampshade was a product of early to mid-2000's Newgrounds culture. It is hard for me to determine if that is better or worse than the dialogue in this game, though.

Although the game has excellent pixel art, it appears to be following the trend of many modern indie titles that prioritize style over substance. Consequently, my overall impression of the game was poor.

Are we so gullible? Do we as an audience not demand anything from our art? There's no story, no new mechanics, no real characters, no interesting or enjoyable visuals, no compelling gameplay, no original ideas at all in fact. Is a faceless strawman to antagonise really enough to get millions of people to play an Unreal Engine asset flip made as artlessly as possible? Is no one else actively disturbed by how blatantly and gracelessly this rips mechanics from every popular game of the last 2 decades, without integrating any of them together whatsoever? Has art ever felt this cynical before?

Feel free to discount my opinion. I am a 'salty Pokemon fanboy' after all, and I only gave this game an hour or so of my not particularly highly valued time. I personally just prefer the art I engage with to care for the art form it sits within, even a little bit. Palworld hates video games. It sees nothing more within them than a collection of things to do and hopes that by shovelling a flaccid farcical version of as many of them as possible into your mouth it will somehow constitute a 'video game' when all is said and done. It doesn't. I'm deeply saddened that so many gamers think so lowly of our art form that they genuinely think this is acceptable.