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.