“In two days they began to come upon bones and cast-off apparel. They saw halfburied skeletons of kittysaurus with the bones so white and polished they seemed incandescent even in that blazing heat and they saw panniers and packsaddles and the bones of banbans and they saw a nabnab entire, the dried and blackened carcass hard as iron. They rode on. The white noon saw them through the garten like a ghost army, so pale they were with dust, like shades of figures erased upon a board. The naughty one sloped paler yet and grouped and skittered and lifted their lean snouts on the air. At night the nabnabs were fed by hand from sacks of givanium and watered from buckets. There was no more sickness. The survivors lay quietly in that cratered garten and watched the whitehot drones go rifling down the dark. Or slept with their monster hearts beating in the unity assets like workers exhausted upon the face of the Banban Kindergarten, clutched to a namelessness wheeling in the night. They moved on and the iron of the lifts grew polished bright as chrome in the pumice. To the south the blue Cityngeon stood footed in their paler image on the unity assets like reflections in a lake and there were no naughty ones now. They took to riding by night, silent jornadas save for the trundling of the lifts and the wheeze of the nabnabs. Under the moonlight a strange party of elders with the white dust thick on their stitches and their eyebrows. They moved on and the drones jostled and arced across the firmament and died beyond the inkblack cardboard walls. They came to know the nightskies well. Garten eyes that read more geometric constructions than those names given by the ancients. Tethered to the polestar they rode the Worker Liftsround while Train rose in the southwest like a great electric kite. The unity assets lay blue in the moonlight and the iron wires of the lifts rolled among the shapes of the riders in gleaming hoops that veered and wheeled woundedly and vaguely navigational like slender astrolabes and the polished legs of the monsters kept hasping up like a myriad of drones winking across the garten floor. They watched storms out there so distant they could not be heard, the silent lightning flaring sheetwise and the thin black spine of the Cityngeon chain fluttering and sucked away again in the dark. They saw wild monsters racing on the plain, pounding their poorly stitched together models down the night and leaving in the moonlight a vaporous dust like the palest stain of their passing.” -Banban Meridian, or The Evening Badness in the Indie Horror Community by Cormack Banbarty

Euphoric Brothers are slowly yet steadily approaching actual game developer status with each new Banban release. Those two extra months of development show (no, really, they do. There are actual puzzles this time), although the base problems still persist. The story is still nonsense, clearly being dumbed down for young audiences which the devs expect to either not pay attention or be spoon fed by a youtuber for them with the "interesting" morsels of lore being just dumped around the world for you to stop and reaad two-three paragraphs explaining why each Banban does their Banbans in their specific way. There are yet again flashbacks in this one, and they are a perfect way to make your entire VC call lose their shit with what's going on on screen.
The gameplay is still severly bad, the drone being a hindrance for puzzle solving most of the time, clearly porpusefully obtuse to make you die during tense situations and completely useless besides pushing buttosn that could be easily pushed by yourself. The inclussion of the 2.0 upgrade is kinda novel, but the way it controls makes it absolutely dreadful to play. You are expected to use it to see the solutions for other puzzles and push hidden buttons, but the thing will reset back to your position the second you hit a wall, something that happens way too often thanks to the tank controls it has.
The game still looks pretty ugly, but the lightning and music has been upgraded, making it look actually nice from time to time.
They got some youtubers to voice characters in this one, in their original voice. Get ready to be screamed at in various languages for some reason. It makes a genuinely dissorienting experience out of it all.

A definite improvement over 4 and 6, Garten of Banban 7 is a solid entry in the series as far as Banban games go, but doesn't rise far above the hellhole of laughably bad design that plagues this franchise. Barring a couple exceptions, puzzles are once again either obscure and horribly thought out, or brain-dead easy. I found the story incredibly boring and meandering compared to the peak that is Banban 3, but its still better than the filler slop of 4, or the infuriating melodrama of 6. One thing I will commend is the area design: It is easily the best in the series, and actually has a good amount of atmosphere and scope to it. The drone control mechanic is a cool development in concept, but it gets stuck so easily that it is laughable in execution. There are also invisible walls everywhere, which attempt to keep you from going the wrong way, but just end up being a hindrance. This game has much more thought put into it than the others up to this point, and I think it is the best-made game in the series up to this point on a technical level, but I was not as entertained as when I was playing 3. My main takeaway from this game is that if the Euphoric Brothers take more than a couple weeks to work on a game, and mix that with entertaining events in the story, they could make something that is not absolutely horrible. That isn't what this game is, though.
2.5/10

Behold, the first open world Garten of Banban. That’s only half a joke. Every Banban after… I think 3 has placed everything around a central hub you continually return to, and this time said hub is like, this fuck-huge city with NPCs walking around, where the core areas you go to are landmarks within and such. Honestly when I entered it for the first time my immediate thoughts were ‘oh god they’re gonna make me search for a keycard in this haystack aren’t they?' but… by and large the game is rather benign about its padding. Not like it isn’t there, or anything — the game is evidently still on its quest to run out the steam refund timer by taking as long as possible to beat — but, as opposed to the endless hallways, forced backtracking and stupid platforming segments of previous Banban games, at least here things are stretched out in terms of things you can actually interact with. Minigames you have to do three times when just once could be enough. Points where you’re told to do something, you do it, and then the game moves the goalpost right when you think you’re allowed to progress. It’s still not great, mind you, but it's at least more interactive, and a bit less blatant about its intentions. If it continues down that road, then… look, it’s never going to be good, but at least an upward trajectory is… something?

And, admittedly, this is a step up. If not quite a return to... ‘form,’ it's at least trying to scurry back up to where it once was, like somebody rushing past all the enemies in a souls-like to get back to the boss as quickly as possible. There’s a genuine attempt at an atmosphere here — a focus on audiovisual elements, that… if still not making the game scary, are at least somewhat striking. There’s mood lighting. There are cockroaches scurrying across the floor. There’s background music. Creatures slamming against the walls as you’re exploring an area. There’s this one room with a wet floor where you see the corpses of these things hanging from the roof as you walk towards a silhouette in the distance and if they went with a higher saturation light it honestly would’ve worked. It’s not much, but it’s an improvement, and it gives some segments a bit more character than they’d have otherwise. Gameplay wise… it’s rather basic — and I wouldn’t say it’s like Garten of Banban 4 where it’s… honestly fun at points — but there’s some highlights. There’s a neat chase sequence where you not only have to parkour from building to building, but also figure out where exactly you need to actually go in the heat of the moment. There’s this section where you basically take an exam on how well you recognize some of the characters that was honestly a bit stressful? Maybe I'm easy to impress, or eager to be impressed, but while it’s not back on the upward curve — not yet — it's at least headed in the correct direction. Or something approximate to it. It's better than Garten of Banban 6, that's what I'm saying.

Unfortunately, there’s some new stuff here which… decisively does not make the game better for its inclusion. The drone, once again, is given an upgrade. And, once again, it’s horrible: now you can physically become the drone and fly it in first person and it controls exactly as well as you think it does. Hitting, or even just brushing a wall locks you in place for several seconds. The animation for this also forces the drone to recoil downwards, and if doing so should accidentally cause it to clip into something? Back to the start. Which is merciful, of course, but it makes even the simple act of going through a window a herculean task. Not even going into how the game will still have the drone in the last place you’d used it when you enter drone POV, forcing you to either back out and recover it or force the drone over vast swaths of map level just to get it where it needs to be. And also not even going into how one time I clipped into the wall and sequence broke the drone into another section entirely. And also there’s this one point of the game where it’s- where it’s literally just the baby chase from Resident Evil Village??? And yet they don’t understand what made the baby chase as standout as it was? The core of what makes that whole section work so well in RE8 is how simple it is: you see baby, you run back to where you came from, you pick one of the many hiding places the room provides you, and then you wait until the baby leaves. You’re not likely to die bar you actively attempting to throw yourself into the baby’s maw, which is then to its benefit: you don’t lose that initial impact of the baby just appearing through having to watch the cutscene again. Garten of Banban 7 fucks up in this regard: not only does the game telegraph hard that something’s about to barge into the room (where part of what makes RE8’s rendition work so well is how it happens out of nowhere) but there’s a full puzzle you have to do which involves summoning the drone and making it push buttons as you leap off of tables, all while you continually have to juke the baby around tables and rooms, all the while never quite telegraphing to the player what they’re actually meant to be doing. I didn’t even realize just what made the baby section work as well as it does until I saw this fuck it up, but I guess that’s one way of showing how imitation can be flattery. Sometimes you make it clear how the original is so much better.

Oh, yeah, sidenote, that rooftop chase I mentioned a couple paragraphs up? It literally begins with the threat right in front of you, and the area you need to initially get to… right behind it. I’m still waiting for that Euphoric Bros. masocore platformer, honestly. I still think that’s their true calling.

Aside from those notes… it’s a Garten of Banban game, I guess. A lot of the highs and lows are things I’ve already talked about previously covering the series. Its attempts at being scary, its attempts at delivering the Deep Lore are laughable at best, but in the midst of all this is this honest-to-god soap opera plotline which is honestly incredible to watch unfold, bolstered by a penchant for humour, of catching the player off guard, which… at least works more often than it doesn’t, even if here I noticed a couple jokes repeated from previous episodes. The voice acting remains as gloriously inconsistent as it's always been: pretty decent performances placed in conjunction with one of the developers speaking in monotone while constantly bumping the mike placed in conjunction with this... guy from Boston? guy with an Irish accent? desperately trying and failing to sound Australian. Gameplay wise, the modus operandi still seems to be padding, padding, padding: through making it take as long as possible to get from A to B, to having puzzles where the barrier to progress is “what am I even doing”, to hiding objectives where no player would assume they’d be. I’ve gotten the sense, perhaps, that this stretching out is on at least a little bit of a macro level as well, padding out this story as long as possible to make more games to get more $$$ from the kiddies who’re unironically eating this up, and Garten of Banban 7... does not beat those allegations — ending the plotline I thought the series was going down and cliffhanging on a completely new one. I know a non-zero amount of people here dropped after 6 for that reason, but if there’s actually an endgoal to all of this, if the games remain at least interesting in how they flounder then I’m still willing to keep going. I guess we’ll have to wait and see next time. 4/10.

Genuinely, if you're still irony poisoned, or forced to play it (hi,) or an active follower of the franchise, play this one for yourself. No, it's not worth 10 bucks. No, it absolutely does not stand on its own, brush up on (don't play) 4 and 6 first. Yes, this and the past two games should just be one game. These are the leading reasons why I'm not rating it higher, but my god, I did not ever expect that Banban would land more than one conscious hit with its humor, let alone more than I could count on one hand. The quality isn't an up-and-down jumble like 6 was, it's more consistently middling (which is far better than anything that's come before this,) but god is it an absurd adventure at times. I don't even know what to say anymore. You win, Lena. You win.