I'll start with some of the more positive stuff before delving into the puzzle mechanics of the game, which I can tell you, I didn't find complex enough.

The game is pretty, or at least that's what I imagined when playing it on the switch, because it was frame dropping everywhere, and changing from one ball to another would always cause a big skip. The game even crashed at one point. The beauty of the game comes instead from the usage of colour and the atmospheric environments, filled with alien structures and geometric patterns (Geometric Interactive? Hello?).

Now, let's get to the meat of the game. I was told this was a puzzle game, but for the first hour and a half there is nothing more than busywork. The red ball is the most boring of them all, only giving you the power to pass through the orange bridges, and a good amount of this first half is spent doing just that. Navigating bridges does not require thought, just go forward and press every button. Then there's the green ball, which funnily enough presents more interesting puzzles by itself than when combined with the red one and being asked to use the game's main gimmick.

Unfortunately, the shallowness of handling multiple balls is not fixed by introducing more of them. After "solving" the inside of a ball, it is reduced to a box. You will be stuck in some kind of hub area with a couple ball holders, until you get the ability that lets you move towards the new hub, after some navigation. You may place balls inside this box, and move it. There is no interaction with the outside world, which does not care in the slightest what there is inside of the box you are carrying. During this first 1h 30m, I was thinking hard about how could they possibly provide this system with any depth, and the thing is, they just can't. In the future though, the introduction of some more "dishonest" mechanics does give some of this much needed complexity.

Why am I making emphasis on the 1h 30m mark? Well, up until this point, there isn't a single one of the stations that allow you to go inside a ball, inside another ball. For what is almost half the play-time, the main gimmick of the game just doesn't appear, being able to go only 1 ball deep. During all this time, the game is just juggling balls, leaving them "outside" when you don't need them, and bringing them inside when you do, as if using some kind of overly complicated Hold button from tetris. Even when allowed to go 2 balls deep, my previous paragraph still applies. The top level world is simply replaced by the new world.

Finally I will talk about how the game just doesn't leave any space for incorrect paths. Of course, that you can't leave balls behind and mess up your save is good (except there was a puzzle near the end where I swear you could do that?). What I'm refering to is the fact that the mechanics being so simple aren't helped by limiting your options to being able to drop balls only in specific spots, and go inside or outside a ball on designated points. It just leaves so few possibilities that the solution may as well be a straight line: just press every button, drop your ball on every pedestal, and the game does the thinking for you. It will go as far as suddenly closing bridges or putting up walls breaking up interconnected areas, just so you don't try to go back for the ball you left behind.

Anyway what saves the game is that I found some puzzles around the 95% mark to have interesting ideas. In general, most of the good puzzles have little to do with the hopping inside balls gimmick, and are simply related to the powers of the balls.

I'll start with some of the more positive stuff before delving into the puzzle mechanics of the game, which I can tell you, I didn't find complex enough.

The game is pretty, or at least that's what I imagined when playing it on the switch, because it was frame dropping everywhere, and changing from one ball to another would always cause a big skip. The game even crashed at one point. The beauty of the game comes instead from the usage of colour and the atmospheric environments, filled with alien structures and geometric patterns (Geometric Interactive? Hello?).

Now, let's get to the meat of the game. I was told this was a puzzle game, but for the first hour and a half there is nothing more than busywork. The red ball is the most boring of them all, only giving you the power to pass through the orange bridges, and a good amount of this first half is spent doing just that. Navigating bridges does not require thought, just go forward and press every button. Then there's the green ball, which funnily enough presents more interesting puzzles by itself than when combined with the red one and being asked to use the game's main gimmick.

Unfortunately, the shallowness of handling multiple balls is not fixed by introducing more of them. After "solving" the inside of a ball, it is reduced to a box. You will be stuck in some kind of hub area with a couple ball holders, until you get the ability that lets you move towards the new hub, after some navigation. You may place balls inside this box, and move it. There is no interaction with the outside world, which does not care in the slightest what there is inside of the box you are carrying. During this first 1h 30m, I was thinking hard about how could they possibly provide this system with any depth, and the thing is, they just can't. In the future though, the introduction of some more "dishonest" mechanics does give some of this much needed complexity.

Why am I making emphasis on the 1h 30m mark? Well, up until this point, there isn't a single one of the stations that allow you to go inside a ball, inside another ball. For what is almost half the play-time, the main gimmick of the game just doesn't appear, being able to go only 1 ball deep. During all this time, the game is just juggling balls, leaving them "outside" when you don't need them, and bringing them inside when you do, as if using some kind of overly complicated Hold button from tetris. Even when allowed to go 2 balls deep, my previous paragraph still applies. The top level world is simply replaced by the new world.

Finally I will talk about how the game just doesn't leave any space for incorrect paths. Of course, that you can't leave balls behind and mess up your save is good (except there was a puzzle near the end where I swear you could do that?). What I'm refering to is the fact that the mechanics being so simple aren't helped by limiting your options to being able to drop balls only in specific spots, and go inside or outside a ball on designated points. It just leaves so few possibilities that the solution may as well be a straight line: just press every button, drop your ball on every pedestal, and the game does the thinking for you. It will go as far as suddenly closing bridges or putting up walls breaking up interconnected areas, just so you don't try to go back for the ball you left behind.

Anyway what saves the game is that I found some puzzles around the 95% mark to have interesting ideas. In general, most of the good puzzles have little to do with the hopping inside balls gimmick, and are simply related to the powers of the balls.

Humans may attribute value based on a variety of criteria. One may assume that because an item is useful, such as food, it is valuable. This is what Plato called the intrinsic value. However, even if an object is not useful by itself, it can obtain instrumental value through the context that surrounds it. The conditions granting an object extrinsic value are too varied to mention here, sometimes being too illogical and subjective to condense into written words, but, unexpectedly, extrinsic value is usually the most desired.

In 2019, Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan would sell two editions of his piece "Comedian" for 120000 USD, to the horror of many art critics. The artwork, when correctly showcased, consists of a banana held against the wall with duct tape. The piece was critiqued due to its lack of beauty, and the simplicity of its form.

In 2021, the trading volume of Non Fungible Tokens (NFTs), in an unprecedented spike, increased to 17 billion USD. Some of the more well-known digital art NFT collections, including CryptoPunks and Bored Apes, consisted of ten thousand randomly generated images of pixelated heads and upper torsos of monkeys, respectively, the ownership rights of which were subsequently sold for apparently ludicrous numbers. The digital artwork was criticised for its unpleasant appearance, as well as fuelling speculative valuation of the items.

There is a saying that life imitates art. In later years, this expression has gained popularity over the idea it refutes, that is, that art is born from the representation of reality. The 2024 videogame “Banana” almost paradoxically supports both sides of the argument in a genius showcase of a side of human behaviour that becomes more relevant each passing day. Art imitates life, through the naturally emerging market inside this work, life imitates art, through the attribution of value to useless, unpleasant pieces.

Banana (2024) puts an end to this false dichotomy, fusing what at first were irreconcilable views, and that in itself, is art.