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.
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.