I played this with a friend watching me and the moment the chairs started fliying and spinning across the room we lost our fucking minds; that, plus the vine booms and Jumbo Josh, fucking sent us.

I’m not gonna dedicate more time to this review than the developers took on making the game: Garten of Banban only holds value in the fever dream-like experience it produces while playing, and it's absolutely shocking how this game fails in almost every department, be it visually, level design-wise or the general concept.

At first, back when I heard of it, I just thought it was a normal bad game that had the misfortune of turning into the poster child of everything that's wrong with modern broader horror, but after seeing more of it and know playing it, I now know better, oh do I understand now.

This is like if someone with zero artistic qualities tried to do a macaroni art version of the Mona Lisa, except that in this case the Mona Lisa isn't even that good. Uninspired, visually overly simplistic and ugly, puzzle logic that seems to be designed by some kind of rat man that has lived in the sewers for 20 years that purely consists on going around on cycles finding stuff and telling a drone to bump into buttons and finding electric pads under FUCKING DESKS, non-existent horror elements, aspirations of being a cash-grab by following a episodic format and having a god-forsaken merch-store, horrible setting that doesn't make any kind of sense at a logical level (the games it follows beat by beat even manage to make their settings at least believable), putrid art-style, poorly designed, vile, unappetizing, disgusting excuse for a videogame it has ever been my displeasure to have entered within the range of my visual field!... and yet, I... I fucking adore it.

This game activates all of the dumbest neurons in my brain, reaching high levels of awfulness while not being absolutely infuriating or boring. It’s a like seeing a clown car crash, it’s horrible and you can’t stop looking at it, but it’s funny in a very twisted way. It all is just bonkers enough to be endearing, with character designs that are stupid as they are the best things in the universe; Jumbo Josh is an absolute unit and a king and I shall not take any negatives for an answer. And the best part of all of this is that I’m not alone, my friend was also losing his shit at this game, as so did what it seemed like the entire internet, and is a fascinating case almost deserving of study how this preposterous product such at thus could have this effect, but it’s precisely that twisted fun what gives it’s only thing of value.

It’s Garten of Banban the worst thing ever? No, as much as I have trashed on it, it’s at least functional, it at least has a semblance of design, it at least it has kinda neat ideas in theory, at least it’s funny… which may be the bare minimum to ask but hey, at least it does something. I know that it’s its short duration what prevents it from being and absolute shitshow, and I don’t have any kind of doubts that the other chapters wouldn’t be deserving of an extra half-star, but hey, at least I can say of this one that there was an attempt kinda not really.

It's bad, it’s borderline atrocious, but it’s kinda amazing how a game can give me so much joy in a way it didn’t intend at all. This is the definition of a guilty pleasure, except it’s not really a pleasure… ‘’guilty novelty’’, yeah, I think that’s the better way to put it.

This is, indeed, the BOTY.

i love videogames

in fact I live my daily life ⅓ of my time thinking about videogames ⅓ thinking about furry stuff/drawing things/university exams and ⅓ thinking about dick and sex and boys

even though people may not think so videogames are a form of art lately experiences like outer wilds shadow of the colossus fata morgana nier replicant arches really helped me through a lot of stuff happening in my life and even changed my worldview in some cases

this ? this is disgusting absolutely fucking garbage a cashgrab like no other I wish to say that its so bad to make me laugh but this is genuinely the worst of the worst incredibly uninspired just trying to monopolise on youtube playthrough hollow minded content creators grabbing any rubbish with some gripping background to get clicks from people mentally aged at a whopping 8 years old level of intelligence

ok im joking this was too aggressive im not that mad at this but genuinely what the fuck this game has original portal level of environments and it made my gaming personal computer fucking explode can you even believe that

trying to hop on the "mascots for babies are actually scary" train these famously untalented people in the industry just tried a quick clickbait kind of game and somehow succeeded accordingly

if you want you can complete the game in 20 minutes all you're gonna do is go around doing some elementary school level environmental puzzles with a drone and getting eggs around the playground and omg… there's a chasing sequence from a pink bird… so spooky omg omg im so scared I pooped my pants no clickbait this game made me shit my pants 100% real (legendado) andate a cagare coglioni dai I can't say this in english

anyway the art design is purposely uninspired there's assets that you can get fom free on the Internet and the couple of stuff they actually put is abysmal thank you for your effort but you failed

five nights at freddys is a great example of this trope used accordingly . it created a genre it was really original for its time and played a really haunting experience even though kind of janky and king of cheap

this one ? allegedly it's an horror game and I genuinely believe it's a better source of laughter than dread and if you genuinely get scared from this shit don't ever touch silent hill or resident evil and I don't even get scared by those game cmon

in the finale you get a boohoo cliffhanger with a jumpscare omg I shat my pants im so ready for the sequel fuck yourself this is the first and last game in this series im ever gonna play even if garten of banban 9 gets a 4.5 score on this hell site I will never touch it thank you for making this game because my bar got so fucking low that I will now regard saya no uta as a masterpiece bye support me on my furry art twitter

Imagining this being played by its target audience, but, more specifically, a version of myself who is young enough to be the target audience. I download it at the age of 8 and barely survive the first 19 minutes because of the terrifying Viva Pinata bird. Minute 20 hits and I come face-to-face with Jumbo Josh; his goofy fucking face comes out of the darkness and I start absolutely screaming. I am not okay. My mom bursts into the room and asks what's wrong and then gets really annoyed when I tell her it's because Garten of Banban scared me and we get in an argument over how she knew she couldn't trust me not to play something inappropriate and I get sent to my room. Later on that night I hear my mom say "this is why the computer isn't good for him!" and my dad starts arguing back about how I'm a growing boy. They're screaming now at each other and usually that would already be upsetting but it's even worse because all the while I'm fucking terrified that Jumbo Josh is going to burst into the living room and kill them both. I go to school the next day and all the kids have just watched the Markiplier playthrough of Garten of Banban 2 and they ask me what I thought of it and I sheepishly say I'm not allowed to play Garten of Banban and one of them calls me a pussy and gets sent to the principle's office for it and the whole class hates me. I didn't even rat him out someone was just around to hear him say it but they all still blame me. On the way out to the busses at the end of the day I walk by a kid wearing the $59.99 "Banban's Party" backpack you can buy from a link on the game's main menu and I see Jumbo Josh and start freaking out again. Was going to rate this one star but I'm mad now because this could have happened to me so now it's getting half a star.

There are several words I wish I could say about this game. Many of which I will unfortunately be unable to say without threat of legal action, but I shall try my best.

Speaking from my own experience as a hobbyist and aspiring game developer, Garten of Banban feels much like the kind of projects you throw together when you're just getting your feet wet with a new engine, style, or just game development in general. The kind of unpolished, unoptimized mess of various mechanics jammed into each other that you know isn't anywhere close to a finished product, but still feel proud of just on the basis of getting it working at all. The kind that will never see the light of day, aside from maybe a few friends you send it to being like "Check this out, first time doing this, can't believe it actually works.", knowing full well future attempts will start from scratch now that you know what you're doing. And yet, here it is, published, with a merch link on the main menu.

I was fortunate, having the foresight to enlist a dear friend who shares whatever deep-rooted trauma or mental illness draws me to this style of game. Were it not for their company, I likely would have been driven to my breaking point, and for that, I am thankful. I don't often outwardly express frustration in a non-joking manner, so the fact that I let out an involuntary cry of pure rage at one point goes to show this game's ability to get into your head. In a way, it's almost impressive, given the length and quality.

Graphically, this game looks worse than one made in Roblox. And I'm not talking about the Roblox of today, where there's somehow actual money behind the experiences, I mean the Roblox my elderly, 23-year-old self played as a preteen, where a diagonal cylinder seemed like a greater feat of computer engineering than landing man on the moon.

Short aside, cylinder is such an odd word. It's one of the few words in English where it's spelled almost exactly how it's pronounced, and yet I can never get it right because I'm not used to that being the case.

Anyway, back on topic, almost everything in this game is made up of single color 3D shapes occasionally textured; the visual equivalent of plain, slightly-undercooked pasta, which really begs the question: why does this game run so poorly? I admittedly am rocking a decently old ThinkPad from 2018, but even still, I manage to run games with significantly more graphical and computational demands than this realistically should have. For god's sake, I got through decently modded Skyrim on this ol' boy with more consistent performance. I'd love to say I know the answer, but alas, I have not yet managed to use Blender for more than 20 minutes without getting so frustrated I remove it from my computer, so I cannot speak on the intricacies of 3D graphics.

Now, onto the story.

Now, onto the gameplay. Not great, I gotta say. As I was sorta saying above, it's just a bunch of mechanics thrown together. Due to how short the game is, each new, unrelated mechanic is only really used the one time and never again, barring the "press button with drone" or "press button on wall with correct key in possession." The one time you're introduced to a new gameplay mechanic that builds off an existing one, it is only used for the single "silent tutorial" type introduction puzzle and then never again, it's genuinely hilarious.

During the horror chase sequence, I almost lost my mind. You're forced to run along a snaking platform slowly extending from the wall, and the combination of the slippery movement, single-digit framerate and just my general overreation to the idea of being chased led to me dying over and over and over just from falling off the goddamn platform. Thankfully, it seems the devs learned from their mistake, as they implement invisible barriers later in the same sequence to prevent you from accidentally succeeding in a way they didn't intend, i.e. running straight for the exit instead of pressing a random button on the wall first. A button which is next to a near-identical button that does nothing, that I definitely didn't spend too long mashing before realizing my mistake and getting caught, no sirree.

Why am I doing this, why am I writing this? What compelled me to spend more time than it took playing the actual game writing this review? I don't know. I really don't. I had a miserable time playing this, which really begs the question: Why am I going to play the sequel? Who can say.

im not even gonna bother giving this a fake 5 star review for the joke because this genuinely should never have became a popular series even if it was for ironic reasons

every entry is devoid of any effort or creativity to the point where it's infuriating. it only exists to take advantage of the younger horror audience obsessed with shit like bendy or poppy's playtime to make money.

the modeling work is abysmal and any and all actually decent looking models in the games are all from either the unreal asset store OR are from other people. animations look like they were made in mere minutes. the story of the main protagonist looking for their child, even though it is a bland concept to begin with, it all gets thrown out the window for dogshit filler that just feels like empty nothingness with dialogue that all sounds like chatgpt generations

nothing can convince me that ANY thought was put into ANY of these games. they are worthless and i long for the inevitable future where it is all forgotten and nobody will feed into no effort garbage like this anymore. not even for the joke

Whatever you do, please don’t tell the people on the backloggd discord server I gave this a half-star.

Uninteresting, unfinished, ugly. Not in a good way; only almost atmospheric. Feels like a game that my little cousins would play on their phones at some sort of event, like a graduation or a wedding. The game amounts to a tiny series of fetch quests in a liminal kindergarten and one minor inconvenience of an ‘encounter’, and none of it works or congeals into anything resembling a compelling gameplay experience or even a lucid statement to the contrary.

Appreciated that it was free, but I suppose they robbed me of precious time, which is all we really have at the end of the day. You couldn’t even ride down the slide.

The story of Garten of Banban is a simple one: somebody makes a thing, somebody else calls the thing cringe, everybody dogpiles on it, and the thing gains attention and sales and notoriety it wouldn't have gotten had it never received that initial derision. In the case of Banban, somebody made a tweet making fun of how they were already trying to sell merch upon just releasing the game, causing a snowball of Youtubers and other commentators decrying the game as the ‘death of mascot horror.’ How Garten of Banban represented the apex point in how indie horror had ‘fallen’ into a vector of cheap commercialization: the use of lore and episodic releases merely a vehicle to sell merchandise (which, believe me, real rich when those critiques come from the Bendy & The Ink Machine dev). This brought upon a wave of people to shit on the game, in a way that pretty directly gave it success in a way the developers had never been able to capture before — I was loosely aware of their output before they released Banban, and lemme tell you, they weren’t exactly doing numbers before it became cool to dunk on them. It’s the type of thing where the hate train based on its obvious bid for commercialization vs. low quality gave it the exact attention it wanted, one where the game itself isn’t as important but what it represents, and what it then managed to do.

So what’s the game actually like?

…It’s mostly just kind of whatever.

Not good, mind you, but not nearly worth the attention it got, nor does it really deserve to be amongst the worst games ever. Frankly, playing it, I was mostly just amused by just how hard it apes from Poppy Playtime’s first episode. It’s far more well known today about how its attempt at making as much money as possible caused it to burn out and lose all the goodwill it had, but something people tend to forget about Poppy Playtime is that part of how it got the opportunity to get to that point was because of the genuine promise its first episode showed. It had a really solid core mechanic and some neat puzzles to go along with it. The chase scene at the end is a rather well-done climax, forcing you to think on your feet and working well to pay off all the tension that'd been slowly building as you went deeper and deeper — as the reception area became a factory, and as it slowly became clear that something's wrong with the place around you.

Garten of Banban tries these things… and doesn’t quite reach the same success. The drone you direct around the facility mostly just feels like it’s there so the game actually has mechanics, and it’s clunky and finicky and awkward to direct around, especially when you’re trying to change its vertical position or corral it through a door. The one puzzle the game has is braindead until it's not, the last step requiring rather specific use of the drone in an unclear order of operations which makes it feel rather oblique. It never really quite makes use of its setting: while Poppy Playtime uses its setting in a factory to inform its puzzles/setpieces and let the player do fun things, it feels like you could transplant Garten of Banban to virtually anywhere else and it’d play the same way (you don’t even get to go down the slide :c). Any attempts at building tension, or atmosphere don’t work. The messages on the wall might be a decent idea, but the writing chops are not there to make it work, and all the attempts at having the kindergarten… teacher… mascot… things try and be scary just feel laughable: the weird and simplistic designs combined with their really loud colours just makes anything they do feel rather goofy.

Its attempt at imitating the climactic chase sequence of Poppy Playtime’s first episode is also rather ineffective. While I do like the idea of Opila Bird’s AI trying to imitate a bird of prey, the setting fails to take advantage of any of that: depending on your positioning when the chase starts you’re either immediately fucked or can clear the whole thing in like, five seconds. There’s no music, no difference in the sound design, no real attempt at a change in tone to signify that this is the big climactic threat: it’s treated with the exact same gravitas as everything else you’ve done up to that point. The main reaction I had upon completing the chase was ‘wait, that’s it?’ spending what was left assuming that something more would happen, beyond the "oh boy, next episode's gonna be real wild!" cliffhanger I knew wouldn't mean anything. That there'd be something concrete, here and now, that’d deliver a tangible climax. That there’d be one last attempt at a scare.

…There wasn’t.

Frankly, I’m not sure I can name anything this game executed to its intended effect, but on the other hand, I personally can’t manifest enough in me to truly dislike or hate this. Like, it functions, it's short, I wasn’t actively having to fight the game to try and beat it, most of its flaws just feel... goofy, if anything. Is it good? No. Should my score for this maybe be lower? Probably. Is it really worth all the vitriol, all the negative attention, all the claims that this game is the death of indie horror as we know it? Frankly, I don’t see it. 3/10.