Reviews from

in the past


It's a game with a fantastic story, but it takes quite a long time for it to truly step in (roughly 40 hours, yeah that's a lot), but when it does, you're in for a wild ride.
The worldbuilding and the music are spectacular, those are some of the best aspects of this game for me.
The game lacks some quality of life adjustments, but the sequels make up for it.
And if you DO get to keep playing after those 40 hours I mentioned earlier, I'm sure you'll become a fan of the franchise.

An idiot such as myself could make a better game.

A complete failure of a game. Gameplay is tedious and purposefully time consuming. Actors are phoning in their performances. Graphics are both basic and rudimentary yet somehow chug your pc due to poor optimization. Music is uninteresting and window dressing.

If you are curious about the series and want to see what it’s like play the free one. Paying any money for this is a crime against your wallet.

jumbo josh wasn't in this one as much even though he was teased at the end of banban 1

Graphics- 1/10 Just blank default textured walls and art that couldve been drawn by a 6 year old.

Fun- 0/10 There is no inkling of fun in this game, it actively hurts at times.

Story- 2/10 There is some semblance of a story but its not particularly interesting yet.

Replay value- 0- This game is a waste of time on a first playthrough, let alone a second.

Cost/Value- You could give this to me for free and id still want my money back, so 5$ is a rip off.

Game length- About 1 or 2 hours

Who is this game for- Mindless idiots and kids who just buy any new horror game a youtuber reacts to in a funny way, and those who like shitty discount "mascot horror" games, and I guess the people who play this for a meme or whatever.

- While this game is not as bad as the first game (at least this one sort of resembles a game), This "game" is trash, its a shameless cheap cash grab trying to profit off of other more successful "mascot horrors" like poppy playtime and fnaf.

I am aware that this game also has gotten a huge cult following at this point, I'm not sure if this is because of pure memes, or there are some of you who actually enjoy this no effort garbage, but I'm holding out hope and going to hang in there for better games in the next FOUR that have come out.... but then again 7 games released in a single year kind of proves my point and I don't think I should be holding my breathe for any semblance of quality anytime soon

This game features lame and tame "scares", long and boring sections that seem to go on forever even though this game is only like a single hour long.

Frustrating as all hell parts, collecting stupid birds and walking 30 seconds to put them in the pen, and doing that over and over again until you've just wasted almost 5 minutes getting them all together, the developer thought it was a good idea to put the only door out of there have an instant death hiding behind it. If you aren't following a guide like I wasn't, this just instantly makes you mad since you have to re-catch all the birds all over again

Stupid random parkour section in the middle of the game, the crap momentum based jumping with no room for error is the PERFECT kind of game for a random colorful parkour section in the middle of a HORROR game with no checkpoints

Theres even a classroom section in the game where it takes forever to get back to where you are, and you have to literally sit through all of the dialogue to select the "correct answer" despite it just being complete guesses, there is absolutely nothing to figure out or learn, it's just trial and error, leading to more bloat and unfair and frustrating sections.

Guess ill be back when I play 3, when I get the courage to at least...

This game has nothing in it. Neither did the last game in the series, why am I playing them then? Because I'm an idiot I guess and I wanted to play a popular game from the internet.

This game would've been 30 seconds long if they cut out all of the time wasters like pointless hide and seek parts (this was also in the last game as well), frustrating puzzles that aren't hard, they are just tedious

I cant handle another shitter like this, its more of a game than the first one, but id rather play 10 minutes of crap anyday over this over one hour long version of the same thing but just as shit.

P.s. The voice acting sucks ass, without looking it up I'm just going to go out on a limb here and the developer is the voice of banban and he's just winging it.


When I played the first Garten of Banban, I found it… not particularly worth the ire. Was it good? Not particularly, but its faults — and its shameless attempts to copy Poppy Playtime — were more funny to me than anything, and not quite capable of manifesting any particular hatred. It’s short, it’s mostly whatever, and the only role it has to play in the commercialization of ‘mascot horror’ is merely just being the most blatant about it. The idea that it (at the time of writing) is considered the 10th 11th worst game of all time, more than anything, is a sign that maybe people need to play more bad games, and that bandwagons can easily catapult something far past wherever it otherwise should be. I can understand feeling that Garten of Banban is a 1/10 because it has nothing to offer — frankly, that’s where I should probably put it. I’m much more confused at the idea that it’s a game that inspires frothing hatred, worth being considered the death of an entire genre, worth the harassment of the devs off social media. There’s just not enough there to really inspire anything passionate.

Garten of Banban II, on the other hand…

…exists solely, blatantly, to waste your time. There’s a throughline, sure — you go down deeper into the depths of the facility, you get your first glimpses of the Deep Lore as the real horror begins — but it's not nearly enough to sustain the full length of the game. Tragically, however, Steam’s refund settings allow people to buy a game, beat it, and then get their money back if they can do it in two hours. The devs didn’t want that to happen to them, so they padded the game out as much as they could to try and prevent that. Which: I don’t blame them, there’s been some history of indie developers not making back their budgets for otherwise well-received games because of people abusing the Steam refund system, I fully understand wanting to avoid that same thing yourself. I feel like there are much smoother ways of achieving this goal without compromising the quality of your work, especially if you’re releasing your game episodically, but I guess, in lieu of any better ideas, this idea works as well as any.

But god does that make this painful to play. The game does everything to make sure that runtime goes over the two-hour mark. Part of this is by natural padding: adding sections that mean nothing, that contribute nothing to the story, that make the whole thing disjointed and kind of aimless. Maybe there’s a concrete beginning, middle, and end in there somewhere, but it’s like an anime with constant, pervasive filler: so much content for the sake of stalling for time that it dilutes and gets in the way of whatever it is that actually moves things forward. It’s not good content, either. It’s clunky, it’s unclear (you’ll have no idea how you’re meant to interact with puzzle elements even if you know, step by step, what you’re meant to do), and it’s not particularly fair. Which is how it pads the runtime out, partially, since your autosaved checkpoints will send you far back before the point where you actually died. Fail the comically long first-person platformer segment (which has no relevance to the greater anything) because this game wasn’t built to be a platformer? Do it all over again. Get killed by the giant bird in a situation that still doesn’t take advantage of its theoretically interesting bird-of-prey AI? Sorry, you gotta collect all the babies again, and the controls for it aren’t any better this time than it was the first time. Fail the classroom segment because it’s all trial and error where one mistake is instant death? Hope you don’t mind not being able to skip the dialogue. It’s so genuinely frustrating. And so much more so when it’s so evident there’s no greater purpose beyond using up more of your time.

It runs like shit, too. Like, generally I’m not someone who super cares about PC performance stuff — if something lags or has graphical hiccups that’s more on me for playing it on PC — but that’s for, like, high-end stuff. Not Garten of Banban. Why is there so much motion blur? Why can’t I turn it off? Why is the framerate so bad as to be actually sickening to look at? Initially I shrugged and just turned everything down… but it still lagged, and now everything was so dark and low saturation that it’s impossible to see the things you need to interact with. A solid tenth of the game was literally me futzing with the graphics settings to see if I could stop it from chugging, and this is on a decently high-end gaming laptop, so preeeeetty sure it’s not my fault, there. It’s not even just an issue of “the game is normal but laggy,” certain sections are so much harder because they don’t run well. If you turn the lighting down too low (and you have to if you want it to run) you legitimately can't see anything: the buttons you need to press to open a door, the specific corridors you need to go down during a chase scene. There’s this part where you have to grab a bunch of baby birds and put them in a nest, but also the lag makes it so hard to catch them, both because they weave and turn in a way that makes it so genuinely hard to corner them and also because the lag makes it hard to tell if you’ve caught one: so many times I caught then immediately let them go. It was painful. The whole game was painful.

…It’s still not a 1/10, though, and this time, it’s because there’s a little bit of merit in the writing. Not necessarily the plot, or the lore — I didn’t care about those — but… there’s a little penchant for what feels like anti-humour that genuinely, almost made me smile a little bit. The whole section in the classroom, gameplay issues aside, was genuinely kind of funny, whether for the intended reason or not. “It’s okay to have no friends and be miserable like me!” is a quote that has genuinely stuck in my head at least once every couple days since playing this. It doesn’t save the game, even remotely — it plays like shit and it runs like shit all just to try and get past Steam’s refund thresholds — but, having heard that episodes three and onward start to lean into the joke a bit more… I have decent faith, given what works here, that maybe I’ll have a bit more fun when I eventually yeet myself back into the mines. Just not right now. Because going through this put me in a bad, bad mood. 2/10.

Why’d i have to get all the birds in the nest like 3 times what the fuck

No one would know what this is if content creators didn't point a finger at it. It's genius in a way because the distinct lack of effort makes the gameplay and designs simple for the kiddos. I have two more games and hopefully they get funnier than this.

I mean, it's an actual game this time, not a good one, but a game.

You see, Banban 1 was like short and it had like nothing in it. However, 2 has more stuff, but all of it sucks so its a 2 and a half hour boring fest of nothing and slop. A normal person would quit here, but I am willing to give this series that I previously wrote off as garbage a chance.

jumbo joshالحمد
this game has higher highs and lower lows than the first. it has some actually not horrible setpieces. the classroom segment was pretty funny and i think the game overall had some areas that were memorable. that's all the good i have to say. the story is awful, the graphics suck, its horribly optimized, the voice acting is parody-level, and this game might have the worst puzzle design i've ever played, to the point where I thought I softlocked myself out of progression 80% of the way through the game.


how tf they made it worse than 1?

This review contains spoilers

Even better than the first! there's A L O T to unpack here tht i dont want to get hidden through the spoiler warning.. actually ill tag it spoilers anyways just to be safe

garten of banban 1 was totally just a prologue for the grander ideas tht they wanted to have for this little universe, it was free! had pretty much three examples of the puzzle types it had to offer! and it really stayed scarce with the monsters it was gonna show you to build them up more and more for whats to come, feed the questions and such

And im here 2 tell u... garten of banban 2 is way better than the first!... i mean like duh lmfao theres more monsters going on here, way more confident dives into the backstory of the kindergarten and all around its just a step up in every way

There are still some things im noticing not really being fixed and thats the laughably huge polygon count for so much of the models, the controller alone is probably why the game fluctuates in how well it runs from time to time and when its dark??.. its fucking BLAAAAAAAAAAAAAACK it is straight up just vanta void ass black like LMFAO LIKE ITS NOT EVEN SOMETHING YOU CAN SQUINT IN IF U INCREASE UR COMPUTER'S BRIGHTNESS.. because of this Nabnab(the spider)'s jumpscare sometimes worked on me and other times i just couldnt even see wtf he was doin it was funny. Tweaking your brightness settings to be max or low can absolutely impact that puzzle, but that puzzle alone is kinda IT! just something funny!

Otherwise the crux and meat of this game shows you the experimentation that goes on, banban's cunning and the shit he's capable of and what he wants to do going forward.. you only really get a taste of it! but he does seem to empathize or sympathize with you and even goes as far as to help you and give you tips for whats to come! Opila is back and im wondering if helping return her kids will make her an ally as well by the next game because despite what the kindergarten mural sayssss.. these guys are NOT working with all the same motives in mind like FNAF would suggest with chica, bonnie, foxy and freddy
infact i think any fnaf comparisons to this series suck rn because this is totally going for something diff
the drone customization is cool and i actually think overcoming each monster's unique little niche is awesome too i kinda hope there's MORE lean into the experimentation aspect of things so that way we can see what all of their REAL identities are...

at the end of the day, its as cheap as a pack of nuts from the gas station and it scared me a few times.. im sorry if this makes me sound less cool to you for having found enjoyment in this but like??? how could i hate this LMFAO
now if this was trying to charge 60 dollars per game or even 40 bucks, then id absolutely understand the outrage
but this(ironically enough especially after my finger wagging earlier a paragraph ago) is something fnaf Also did with releasing an absurd amount of sequels back to back within the span of a year with a myriad of similarities that Can be argued as superficial but also marginal adjustments that lead to be true.

final thoughts: I still unironically like this!!!!!! and no im not being paid or brainwashed swear on my mom! should you BUY it??? MM. dont know bout that
but my venture going forward was out of genuine curiosity and now im interested in whats gonna happen next with the story
Maybe its a little thing i got for weird games! Maybe its tolerance for simplicity with puzzles because of enjoyment i had with roblox obbies when i was young, but at the end of the day i like the models and the vibes these give off!! Now don't get it twisted though, this isnt like a revolutionary game to me and i dont think anyone shitting on these is unjustified JUST because the games are sold cheap, but like
cmawnnnnnnn
u could do a hell of a lot worse

also embarrassing thing to note but like, this is technically a 40 minute long game
like
shorter than space funeral
and yet i clocked in like 2 or 3 hours in it bc i would get lost or googly eyed lookin up and down and thinking at stuff... hrm.
lets see how the third one is
i heard thats unironically the one that a lotta ppl can say feels the most like a Full product of a game but the irony pits are so deep with some people on these games I genuinely cant tell. I've even had to clarify like five times that me enjoying these isnt even a bit or ever was a bit rn which is hilarious but.. YEAH

just as good as gobb 1 but i didnt like stinger flynn puzzle, i liked the rest tho and the voice actring was pretty ehh but its fun they have voices now

As a banbanner. this is the worst banban game.

My boy, Jumbo Josh is not in the portrait of the game, and he doesn't appear that much, but hey, there is lore now, or at least an objective.

a step up from chapter one in a lot of ways, and a step down in just as many others. didn't help that jumbo josh made me furiously masturbate every time he popped up so I was basically softlocked in those sections.

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Bought this game and THANKFULLY I was able to finish it just in time for the refund window.

I have never hated playing a game more

masterpiece, hope we see more

This IS the worst horror game I've ever played. It very much overstays it's welcome, blatantly trying to get over the 2 hour mark so you can't refund the game and still failing. The game somehow barely ran too due to how fucking awfully optimized things like it's models are. It's doodoo.


they got me again im back on the banban shipwreck

as much as i hated the first game i cannot lie and say that i wasnt particularly interested in what fucking garbage they were gonna release after that groundbreaking debut and unbelievably enough its still fucking bad who wouldve thought

the dumb environmental puzzles are back the absolutely jaw droppingly bad art direction is back the environment are as sterile as ever the stupid and tensionless chasing sequences are back basically everything good is back hahahahaha i want to kms

that being said this is longer than the first game and maybe even more hollow incredibly enough it features some of the worst voice acting ive ever heard and in general i hate english voice acting so imagine making it absolutely disgustingly one note and emotionless the voice actors feel like they were forced in this project and they want nothing to do with this and im pretty sure thats what happened like imagine wanting your name in this games credit i would honestly sue

the classroom segment is supposed to be funny but it didnt even made me chuckle for how stupid this kind of humor can be even for me that i laugh at the monkey saying stinky poopy 100 times like my entire humor is broken and you couldnt even make me smile a single time gworl youre doing something wrong

i have no idea if this is supposed to be genuine effort or an absolute troll work but im pretty sure everyone can agree that this is devoid of any positives the puzzles even became worse than the first game and the scares are as cheap as they can get and the climactic final chase is honestly so fucking funny for how bad it is literally if you put a mindless jumpscare youre gonna get a cult following because people apparently get scared easily as shit and they couldnt even take this element from FNAF like this is textbook horror cashgrab elements and you failed

so whatever this is the last one every single part of me lost any curiosity to explore how bad this series can get and the next lore analysis on how actually banban is a capitalistic depiction of a head of state in a neo f4scist ruled dystopian world im gonna cut my internet subscription forever and go live in a bungalow in the arashiyama sagano bamboo forest forever dont talk to me

plus its still optimised like shit get a programming degree or something

Five Nights at Freddy's was an actual mistake.

There are a million forgettable YouTube videos out there titled shit like "How [Game] Broke Me" but this one actually did break me and it's probably because I walked in thinking it would be as long as the first game lmao.

The first 30 minutes of my playthrough of this consisted of me and my friends watching me play this over Discord just quoting that "what one is your favorite" tiktok whenever I was reminded of a character existing by all the decals haphazardly placed on all the plain color walls but as the game went on and I realized it would not be over soon all I could do was laugh. Every time I was thrown into yet another room with half a dozen items to find and collect all I could do was laugh. All 3 times you have to sit and trial & error your way through that shitty classroom section all I could do was laugh. It's not even funny-bad like the first game is, I was only laughing at my own hubris for thinking I could knock out the whole series in the span of a night. Zumbo sauce.

Can't wait to play 3 tomorrow!