Saying that playing through Garten of Banban 6 was a learning experience for me might confuse people.
If you’re unfamiliar with the franchise, getting profound insight from an indie horror game might be strange. If you are familiar with it, you might think I’m giving the game far too much credit. However, I feel like Garten of Banban 6 is perhaps one of the most insightful looks into game development and player trends on the market right now. Capable of teaching a lot to inspiring developers about audience retention, game development, and player purchasing trends. If you’re looking to make a game yourself, studying the Garten of Banban series just might be one of the smartest decisions you can make.
But I digress. Let me walk you through my experience with Garten of Banban 6 and review it as a game before I discuss the greater insight it gives into the gaming market.
Garten of Banban 6 is the sixth chapter released for the Garten of Banban game in just under a year. Learning that the original was released in January of 2023 was a bit of a shock for a few reasons. It was first confusing to learn that it hasn’t been around for as long as I remember it being. I swear people have been talking about Banban since at least 2018.
Secondly, there’s just the fact that this is the sixth installment of the series released in under 12 months. The amount of development that must have been rushed to release the game at this pace is astonishing. For reference, Poppy Playtime is just about to release its third chapter, with the original released in 2021.
Garten of Banban’s rapid release date shows in this sixth chapter, which is plagued with the same unintuitive gameplay and bugs as the first. The game revolves around solving lengthy and frustrating (for the wrong reasons) puzzles, often involving a clunky drone mechanic. Your reward for solving these puzzles is cheap jumpscares and uninteresting plot development for a story that is as contrived and confusing as it could be.
I could write a whole section on the drone mechanic’s problems, but I’ll summarize it as clunky and underdeveloped. The range to which you can command your drone to fly is, quite intentionally, far shorter than it needs to be to interact with most objects in a timely or efficient manner. The drone also has a bad habit of getting stuck on things because you can’t order it to fly at a reasonable height reliably.
One section in the game requires you to walk through a long dark hallway, using the light the drone casts to guide your way and protect you from the game’s ominous villains, “the naughty ones.” Unfortunately, because the drone is programmed to only fly towards walls you click on, you can’t order it to hover about you or fly into the air, as the ceiling is out of your clickable range (and would be too far away anyway, even if you could fly to it.) Because of this, I had to fly my drone straight into the ground and inch forward as I commanded it to fly the frustratingly short ranges it was allowed to move at a time.
Of course, there was plenty of bumping into unseeable objects that further slowed me down as I had to navigate the drone out of the spot it was stuck on.
While the problems with the drone mechanic may not have been intentional, the developers have shown it isn’t a problem they care to fix, as one of the puzzles further down the line intentionally makes use of the mechanic’s limitations. This puzzle, despite making use of the limited range of the drone on purpose, also ran into problems of the drone getting stuck on terrain because of the limited range of the drone.
Beyond typical frustrations that carried over from the past titles, I also ran into several new bugs in Garten of Banban 6, including one where the game’s terrain failed to load in and another where reading a note hard-locked progress because I couldn’t put the note down.
The parts of Garten of Banban 6 that work, such as the tedious puzzles, slow the gameplay down to a crawl. One such puzzle you actually can’t solve if you’re colorblind, as it requires identifying three shades of blue, two of which are incredibly close in color, with the difference virtually indecipherable in shadows.
Garten of Banban as a series is almost universally panned online. Legitimate fans seem few and far between, and all you hear about the game seems to be controversy or ridicule. So then, why does the 6th installment currently have over 500 daily concurrent players and a mostly positive review rating on Steam?
Garten of Banban is a series that people love to hate. They revel in making fun of it, talking about how bad it is, riffing on its flaws and inherent corny, low-effort look. People love to hate the game so much that it comes back around to supposed ironic appreciation for the series, leaving sarcastic positive reviews with quotes like “This game has a story that feels like Hideo Kojima wrote it; it brought tears to my eyes” (yes, an actual review.)
Yet, as much as people say they hate or openly mock it, they still buy it. They still watch their favorite content creators play the game and stream it to their friends to riff on how horrible it is in front of an audience.
Garten of Banban is indisputably popular exactly how it is, bad, and may only be so popular because of how terrible it is. So, what is an aspiring game dev to do?
The Euphoric Brothers, in light of Garten of Banban’s mainstream schlocky appeal, have decided to continue pumping the series out precisely as it is. If they had any desire to improve, they’ve had six installments to do so, with the same problems highlighted each time.
And why would they? Why would anyone go the extra mile to improve upon something audiences only want to mock?
A lack of constructive criticism can easily create a deficit of motivation to improve. On top of that, the Euphoric Brothers are highly motivated to keep the series going as the joke that it is, Garten of Banban games keeps selling.
If anything, the developers have shown that they are paying attention and changing the game to accommodate the market. The puzzles and mechanics I discussed before all feel deliberate, almost predatorily, designed to be just as time-consuming and frustrating as possible. The longer it takes to beat, the harder it is for people who buy the game as a joke to refund it later simply. The problem I’m told many of the earlier Garten of Banban entries faced.
Garten of Banban 6 is, if nothing else, a fantastic learning experience for prospective game developers. It shows you that a game does not have to be good to be popular or successful. It shows that putting time, care, and effort into a game isn’t always the most profitable decision. It paints an unmistakable picture of player purchasing trends and reinforces the timeless saying, “There’s no such thing as bad publicity.”
The Final Word
Garten of Banban 6 is not a game worth playing. It’s plagued with bugs, intentionally frustrating and unintuitive gameplay, cheap and unfrightening jump “scares,” and a poorly written story filled with uninteresting characters. Garten of Banban 6 is perhaps the most soulless cash grab on Steam and one I see the developers continue to ride until they can’t anymore.
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Garten of Banban 6 was reviewed on the PC. Find more detailed looks at popular and upcoming titles in the Game Reviews section of our website! Garten of Banban 6 is available on Steam.
