Lester the Unlikely is a strange game in the way that I can't exactly tell who it's supposed to be for. People who play games primarily for the power fantasies they provide (like the early 2010s game reviewers who helped this game go down in infamy) are going to get alienated by the fact that they have to play as a wimpy loser with awkward controls. And people looking for something deeper (don't know why they'd look here but whatever) are going to get alienated by the fact that it still is fundamentally a power fantasy. At the end of the day, Lester still defeats a bunch of pirates, gets the girl, and saves an indigenous tribe in a weirdly colonialist narrative.
So really, Lester the Unlikely is the same as the countless shitty SNES/Genesis platformers with awkward controls, bad level design, and screen crunch. The only difference is that this time, it's "ironic" in the most superficial way possible. All I'm saying is that if this game came out today, I could totally see Lester saying Whedonisms like "Well that just happened" or "That sounded better in my head."

(I was originally going to make a shitpost review about how this was the Citizen Kane of gaming but then I realized that writing a semi-serious review of this shit would be even funnier than any shitpost I could possibly make about it)

Unlike soulless trite that exists merely for cheap thrills like Silent Hill 2, Garten of Banban is a truly meaningful and impactful horror experience. It is a clear commentary on how capitalism ruined education as an institution, turning it from something that existed for genuine development of the mind to something with the top priority of preparing children to be merely another cog in a machine of capitalism. The core contrast between the "wholesome" drawn depictions of the creatures and their real, more radical counterparts is a very clear reference to Lenin's The State and Revolution and the particular quote "attempts are made to convert [revolutionaries] into harmless icons, to canonize them, so to say, and to hallow their names to a certain extent for the 'consolation' of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping the latter, while at the same time robbing the revolutionary theory of its substance, blunting its revolutionary edge and vulgarizing it." While gamers will hail meaningless trash like Disco Elysium and Mother 3 as "masterpieces," the people who truly understand gaming's potential as a form of art will know that Garten of Banban is the true gold standard that games should strive towards.

Actually just kidding this game fucking sucks lmao