Where to even begin with Garten of BanBan. We could talk just about the game itself, but no, for the purposes of this review, we are going all the way back to August 8th, 2014. That’s when the very first Five Nights At Freddy’s game was released on its first platform: Windows. An Android, iOS, and Windows Phone release would follow within weeks.

Garten of BanBan
Developer: Euphoric Brothers
Publisher:  Euphoric Brothers
Platforms: Windows PC, app store, Roblox, Playstation 
Release Date: January 6, 2023 – 
Price: $9.99 per chapter on release – sometimes free

Five Nights at Freddy’s changed the gaming world. A simple enough point and click mascot horror game set in a pizzeria inspired by Chuck-E-Cheese, Five Nights at Freddy’s, or FNAF as I’ll be calling it throughout this article, was genuinely creepy and contained tidbits of lore that revealed a terrible secret behind the killer animatronics haunting the game.

It was also beloved by children most of all, an unusual phenomenon for a horror property. FNAF was followed by several sequels, each one becoming more popular than the last. Even more interesting, a large percentage of FNAF fans never even played the games. Their exposure to the series came from watching their favorite streamers (such as Markiplier and MatPat) play the game.

The massive success of FNAF led to a thousand indie game devs deciding to copy its child-friendly mascot horror game setting. Some of the games that came out of this, like My Friendly Neighborhood and Baldi’s Basics, are fun and worthy additions to the indie scene in their own right.

Others, such as Poppy Playtime and Hunting Season, are simply uninspired or outright rip-offs. Of course, not all indie mascot games released during this post-FNAF period were inspired by FNAF.

Games like Doki Doki Literature Club & Little Nightmares are sometimes lumped together with them as if they were, but they are clearly their own stories with nothing in common with the mascot horror scene. Then there is Hello Neighbor, which has a lot in common with the mascot horror titles here, but coincidentally was already being developed before FNAF was released.

Which brings us to Garten of Banban, a game so utterly uninspired, so bad in every way, that even the streamsers who play it to make money are constantly making fun of it.

Indeed, even the streamer who is most known for playing Banban, Youtuber th3badd3st, had been blocked by the Euphoric Brothers (Banban’s developers) for many months on X merely because he made fun of Banban. The only people I’ve ever encountered who love BanBan uncritically are very little kids, often they experience the game through watching others play it.

So, what’s wrong with Garten of Banban? Everything: Graphics, gameplay, story and price. Let’s go down this list, one paragraph per issue.

Okay, so this is actually the least bad thing about Banban. I’m not one of those triple-A people who insists every game must have state of the art graphics. In fact, I have come to kind of hate the gritty, grimy graphics of many triple-A games like Dishonored and Skyrim.

I much prefer the bright graphics of your typical Nintendo game, and stylish cartoon graphics are among my favorites. So, I’m not bashing Banban for having a cartoony style.

But unfortunately, Euphoric Brothers use bad assets rather for their chapters rather than creating original art. The Euphoric Brothers are constantly buying assets on the asset stores and just tossing them into the game, regardless of whether or not it makes any sense. One recent Banban installment has a nice old school building you can walk…but you can’t actually enter it and its colors contrast with everything around it. This seems to just be due to the devs finding a building they liked on the store and just tossing it in.

This crap happens again and again. Oh, here’s my favorite example: In one Garten of Banban chapter, there is a book that the player character finds which makes them feel strange. The book doesn’t come in again, but it’s implied there are lore reasons for this book’s importance.

However, if you look closely at the book, you’ll see it’s a beginner’s guide to Spanish! No, I highly doubt this was intentional. The Euphoric Brothers just bought another asset without paying attention to the words written on it, so now we have this goofy lore where a book that teaches Spanish has somehow traumatized the player character in ways we will discover in future adventures.

One prominent player in the BanBan commented that maybe the book reminds your character of ICE separating Spanish-speaking families outside the kindergarten. Surely this kind of discourse is not what Euphoric Brothers intended. 

The gameplay of Banban is riddled with glitches that often make the game completely unplayable. But even if there were no glitches, the gameplay itself is just not that good in most cases.

Most of the puzzles take a long time to complete, and often involve using a drone to hit the right buttons on walls where you can’t reach them. The drone is very hard to control and will often glitch in ways that make maneuvering it even more frustrating.

To make matters worse, sometimes it’ll just stop following you and you’ll have to click your remote to try and maneuver it to where you need to go. Some of the fight sequences are trial and error and leave little room to try interesting solutions to beat the enemy.

Your character moves very slowly throughout the game. Corridors are long and you have no choice but to walk at the speed the game wants you to go, this was actually done deliberately by the devs after the release of chapter two of Banban. Why? To pad the gameplay out past the two hours needed for a player to refund the game on Steam. 

The story is complete nonsense. Ostensibly, you are playing for a parent (never specified whether you’re a mother or a father) who visits a kindergarten to bring your child home.

But when you arrive, all the children are gone, it’s implied the employees were murdered, and you find secret levels in the kindergarten leading underground. Soon, you are being attacked by veiny mascots (seriously, why are all the mascots covered in bulging, ugly veins?) of Banban.

Also, where are the humans? After spending hours looking at veiny, expressionless mascotts, I wanted to see humans. How do we look like? What about the employees of this place or the children you’re trying to rescue? What about in the dream sequences where Stinger Flynn leads the mascotts into the outside world – why don’t they ever meet humans there? It gives off the impression that the Euphoric Brothers were just too lazy to create human designs, even though humans play an essential part or the story of Banban. 

There are six chapters of Garten of Ban ban so far, but number six is labeled as seven, while five is labeled as six. Number five never came out, and the developers have never given an explanation.

The officially-labeled number six takes off right where number four leaves off, which means the developers don’t know their cursive, or they’re playing some gimmick where they’ll going to release chapter five as a super-expensive paid chapter down the line. Whatever the case, it’s very stupid.

Now, each chapter ends with your character falling down an elevator several floors deeper into the kindergarten. Surely by now, you should have fallen into the Earth’s core, right? Do the developers have no better way of ending a chapter? Also, there is almost no consistency between chapters.

Characters who were evil enemies in one chapter will suddenly come crawling to as your ally in the next, talking about how bad they feel for their actions. And you have no choice but to accept them. There is no villain in Banban, because one chapter’s villain becomes next chapter’s hero for no good reason.

There are no consequences. Sometimes, it looks like a character was killed. Then they’ll come back later and say ‘Ouch, my head hurts!” or something like that. Worse, it’s easy to forget what you’re doing in the Kindergarten in the first place.

We learn absolutely nothing about our parent character or the kid they’re trying to rescue. It’s just endless, mindless nonsense with no end in sight when you’re playing Banban.

The only good thing about the story is the fact that so far, no child has died in the lore. This would be in very bad taste, considering the game is marketed towards very small children, but this never stopped Poppy Playtime. So at least in this area, Banban is better than Poppy Playtime.

Also, I suppose the Stinger Flyn dream sequences are amusing to experience. None of the other jokes in the game work, but these do. In one of them, Choo Choo Charles makes a cameo appearance. Not sure why the developers of Choo Choo Charles allowed their much better game to be sullied with Banban, but it’s funny that they’re connected.

And that’s where I think I’ll end this review. If you must experience Banban, watch a playthrough from one of the many gaming channels on YouTube. Don’t waste your money on this soulless product.

Garten of Banban was reviewed on PC using a copy purchased by Niche Gamer. You can find additional information about Niche Gamer’s review/ethics policy here.