I am deeply saddened by the state of the series by the 6th entry.
While chapter 1 and 2 weren't anything to write home about, Banban 3 felt like the developers actually managed to create something that could be enjoyable, the puzzles were terrible, but the plot beats hooked us in with the sheer nonsense of the plot coupled with the ridiculous cast of characters but endearing cast of characters that had, at that point, been mythologied by random twitter videos spoiling their appearance. (I admit with no shame whatsoever that I got a bit hyped when Stinger Flynn showed up.)
The well was drying up by the fourth chapter and the bottom of the barrel was completely scraped by the sixth.

The game seems way more stable than before, the devs implemented a proper lightning system this time around, slightly more creative jumpscares and more variety in terms of puzzles.

And this isn't what I am here for, the game is limping to the finish line instead of failing spectacularly in every challenge, the series jumped the shark so repeatedly that having it decide not to do so this time around just feels insulting.

Euphoric Brothers, I know you hate your fanbase, please give us lower quality stuff next time around.

Well, the good times had to end at some point.

A shame, given the… loosely upward trajectory the previous two games had taken. Like, okay, these games certainly never reached good: whatever attempts at being scary or delving into the Deep Lore come off as more goofy than anything, and genuinely it feels like the gameplay is solely focused on making the game run as long as possible to skirt the steam two-hour refund threshold. But even despite that, there were at least… signs of promise, in amongst the muck. They made some of the gameplay sections loosely fun. They mostly made the padding just having you backtrack through super long hallways, which, you know, isn’t particularly amazing, but it’s at least inoffensive: the game could, and had, been doing worse about it. They even found a way to be loosely funny without just spouting the same meme lines over and over again. Everything was looking up.

And then this game began with a first-person platforming segment and I could feel all my goodwill slip away.

Garten of Banban 6, tragically, returns to Garten of Banban 2’s method of trying to run out the timer: physically barring your progress through tedious puzzles, sections that go on for just incredibly long, and forcing you right back to the beginning every time you mess it up. Nothing as awful as 2’s killboxes, but man, do they try. Your core mechanic is that you need to use your drone to light up the ground around you as you head from landmark to landmark, as stepping into the dark is Dangerous now (but only certain kinds of darkness, other types of darkness are completely fine despite it looking exactly the same)... except the landmarks immediately start being too far away for you to see through the darkness, forcing you to kinda just fumble around and hope you’re going in the correct direction. There’s this one segment where you have to push switches to move lights to protect your partner while he does… something, and you get told to do 20 things at once and also the instructions are incredibly unclear and all the buttons you have to press are just so confusing as to what they do. It wasn’t difficult, not once I got the hang of it, but I died multiple times there primarily because I had no clue what I was even doing.

Which is a theme. Honestly, I reckon the devs did a “good” job at ensuring the player has absolutely no clue what they're even doing. There’s the usual stuff of hiding items, buttons you need to press, making the player scour the entire room to try and figure out what they’re even looking for, but this episode seems to go another level with it. I already mentioned the stuff with having to light your way to each waypoint, but there are other highlights. Puzzles where the first step is deciphering what it is you’re even looking at. Sections where the reward for solving them isn’t immediately obvious, making you wonder whether the game just moved the goalposts or if you just need to find whatever just dropped somewhere. Nothing is ever straightforward. Presumably, every second the player spends confused about what they’re even meant to do is one more second the player is spending in-game. Frankly, I think the developers of this game should make an out-and-out masocore platformer at this point. They clearly have a knack for it.

It’s still rather humorous, though, and not just the game’s attempts at being serious and scary. Honestly, even having gone through all of the above, I found it all funny, rather than frustrating. Maybe not in a tire-fire sort of way — it’s all too clear that there’s a degree of intentionality behind all of this — more bemused, more “oh my god what the fuck are they gonna do this time.” I understand that I am one of the few people who continue to believe the joke is funny (it seems like this game, in particular, is where people both dropped and swore off) but either way, even with the dropoff, I’m still onboard. It is a pity that this entry went downhill, though. Now I guess anything subsequent could go anywhere. 2/10.