The story of Garten of Banban is a simple one: somebody makes a thing, somebody else calls the thing cringe, everybody dogpiles on it, and the thing gains attention and sales and notoriety it wouldn't have gotten had it never received that initial derision. In the case of Banban, somebody made a tweet making fun of how they were already trying to sell merch upon just releasing the game, causing a snowball of Youtubers and other commentators decrying the game as the ‘death of mascot horror.’ How Garten of Banban represented the apex point in how indie horror had ‘fallen’ into a vector of cheap commercialization: the use of lore and episodic releases merely a vehicle to sell merchandise (which, believe me, real rich when those critiques come from the Bendy & The Ink Machine dev). This brought upon a wave of people to shit on the game, in a way that pretty directly gave it success in a way the developers had never been able to capture before — I was loosely aware of their output before they released Banban, and lemme tell you, they weren’t exactly doing numbers before it became cool to dunk on them. It’s the type of thing where the hate train based on its obvious bid for commercialization vs. low quality gave it the exact attention it wanted, one where the game itself isn’t as important but what it represents, and what it then managed to do.

So what’s the game actually like?

…It’s mostly just kind of whatever.

Not good, mind you, but not nearly worth the attention it got, nor does it really deserve to be amongst the worst games ever. Frankly, playing it, I was mostly just amused by just how hard it apes from Poppy Playtime’s first episode. It’s far more well known today about how its attempt at making as much money as possible caused it to burn out and lose all the goodwill it had, but something people tend to forget about Poppy Playtime is that part of how it got the opportunity to get to that point was because of the genuine promise its first episode showed. It had a really solid core mechanic and some neat puzzles to go along with it. The chase scene at the end is a rather well-done climax, forcing you to think on your feet and working well to pay off all the tension that'd been slowly building as you went deeper and deeper — as the reception area became a factory, and as it slowly became clear that something's wrong with the place around you.

Garten of Banban tries these things… and doesn’t quite reach the same success. The drone you direct around the facility mostly just feels like it’s there so the game actually has mechanics, and it’s clunky and finicky and awkward to direct around, especially when you’re trying to change its vertical position or corral it through a door. The one puzzle the game has is braindead until it's not, the last step requiring rather specific use of the drone in an unclear order of operations which makes it feel rather oblique. It never really quite makes use of its setting: while Poppy Playtime uses its setting in a factory to inform its puzzles/setpieces and let the player do fun things, it feels like you could transplant Garten of Banban to virtually anywhere else and it’d play the same way (you don’t even get to go down the slide :c). Any attempts at building tension, or atmosphere don’t work. The messages on the wall might be a decent idea, but the writing chops are not there to make it work, and all the attempts at having the kindergarten… teacher… mascot… things try and be scary just feel laughable: the weird and simplistic designs combined with their really loud colours just makes anything they do feel rather goofy.

Its attempt at imitating the climactic chase sequence of Poppy Playtime’s first episode is also rather ineffective. While I do like the idea of Opila Bird’s AI trying to imitate a bird of prey, the setting fails to take advantage of any of that: depending on your positioning when the chase starts you’re either immediately fucked or can clear the whole thing in like, five seconds. There’s no music, no difference in the sound design, no real attempt at a change in tone to signify that this is the big climactic threat: it’s treated with the exact same gravitas as everything else you’ve done up to that point. The main reaction I had upon completing the chase was ‘wait, that’s it?’ spending what was left assuming that something more would happen, beyond the "oh boy, next episode's gonna be real wild!" cliffhanger I knew wouldn't mean anything. That there'd be something concrete, here and now, that’d deliver a tangible climax. That there’d be one last attempt at a scare.

…There wasn’t.

Frankly, I’m not sure I can name anything this game executed to its intended effect, but on the other hand, I personally can’t manifest enough in me to truly dislike or hate this. Like, it functions, it's short, I wasn’t actively having to fight the game to try and beat it, most of its flaws just feel... goofy, if anything. Is it good? No. Should my score for this maybe be lower? Probably. Is it really worth all the vitriol, all the negative attention, all the claims that this game is the death of indie horror as we know it? Frankly, I don’t see it. 3/10.