Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion was a Zelda-like top-down action-adventure that combined Link's legendary adventuring and a quirky millennial sense of humor in a cute world made up of anthropomorphic food. In the upcoming sequel, the root vegetable you love to root for is back to take on another flavor of crime in a whole new genre.

During PAX East last month, I spoke with Jennifer Kindl, creative director and artist on Turnip Boy Robs a Bank and Yukon Wainczak, the game's producer and Snoozy Kazoo's studio head. This time around, Kindl says, "We really want the gameplay to match the storytelling." In practice that means replacing the first Turnip Boy's simple hack-and-slash combat with twin stick shooting and melee. Turnip Boy Robs a Bank is more Enter the Gungeon than A Link to the Past.

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As I sat down with the game — and props to Snoozy Kazoo and Graffiti Games for providing chairs for their demo, my feet were sore as hell — I got a taste of how my favorite turnip had changed since I last committed crimes with him. Turnip Boy has been recruited into doing bank heists by Dillitini, a gangster pickle with an angry, angular mustache and a fedora. You have a homebase hideout where Turnip Boy learns the basics of bank robbing by practicing shakedowns on dummies. Once the van leaves for the bank, you put this into practice, approaching bank employees, and pressing the interact button to make them rain greenbacks which you can hoover up.

Turnip Boy Robs a Bank seems to be an even split between these two areas, at least in the beginning when you can only spend a few minutes in the bank at a time. You can purchase upgrades at the hideout that will help you make it further in your next heist, so after a short first run, I took the money I earned shaking people down and bought a radio blocker that prevented the police from showing up to thwart me for a limited amount of time.

During the three minutes that I got to explore, I saw a lot of obstacles that I couldn't get past with my current skill set. There were safes that I couldn't crack. There was a blocked entrance that required a pickaxe to bypass and a laser tripwire that I couldn't circumvent. Back at the hideout you can log onto the computer and buy things with the money you rake in. And, when my demo timed out, Turnip Boy was sitting pretty with a briefcase packed with 637 bucks. I was already thinking about the upgrades I could buy to get further.

Snoozy Kazoo emphasizes that the section of the game I played is by far the most normal bit of Turnip Boy Robs a Bank. As you get deeper into your heist, Wainczak says that "zones in the bank get progressively weirder and quirkier." After the introductory zone, you reach Seed Stalk which they say is inundated with vegetable growth. Along the way, they promise tons of side quests, more fleshed out than the ones in the previous game.

It seems like "weirder and quirkier" is also the progression Turnip Boy will take as you get further into the game. A pair of twin carrots live back at your hideout and will make bigger and better guns for you, recycling the ones you find while out on a heist. And Robo-Rafael, a cyborg beet (I think?) will, Kindl and Wainczak said, inject you with Robo-Roids, letting Turnip Boy permanently level up.

And Snoozy Kazoo wants the kinds of games the character stars in to change as much as Turnip Boy can evolve in game.

"We view Turnip Boy as a very experimental game franchise character," Wainczak says. "We don't want to do the same thing twice."

The team didn't want to get into specifics about what kinds of games they would like to make, but my request is a Stardew Valley-style Turnip Boy game where Turnip Boy would farm for other vegetables, raising unsettling "How are Goofy and Pluto both dogs?" style questions about the nature of produce.

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