Garten of Banban 3There's a bit in Ico where you need to activate a giant waterwheel. It involves using some form of jump pad (can't remember the details exactly) and grabbing a handle on the waterwheel itself. This is not a particularly important part of the game, but it sticks in my head as the only time I needed to consult a guide and when it turned out I'd done it right in the first place but
just not right enough so I'd wasted loads of time looking in vain for the missing piece of a puzzle, I felt a bit cheated by poor design in a game that is otherwise a bit of a masterpiece.
Garten of Banban is full of these moments. None of it is fun, and when you do find bits that might fall into being an okay game if they're not careful, the irritation by design mantra of this developer ensures you hate them just as much as the pointless busy work.
Your first task is to tidy a room. That's it. You then meet this big orange octopus thing who vaguely threatens you before you have an out of body experience as the octopus and play one of the target shooting sections from the previous game with octopus arms that can shoot electricity. Literally it's exactly the same but you use your electricity arms instead of firing fireworks out of cannons. Then you're in a car with the orange thing, the titular Banban (he of terrible voice acting fame), this weird emu/ostrich that has been trying to kill you for the last two games, and a white fluffy monster woman that was teaching the murder class from GOB2. There's some direlogue which is as pointless as it is embarrassing and they crash the car. You then wake up and have to finish making the spider's girlfriend because he's only angry because he's lonely apparently.
This bit is okay to a point. You have to mix potions to inject into the spider monster thing to finish the experiment, but you also have to fix power fluctuations in the machinery and also push buttons on the wall because reasons. This was actually a bit of a challenge, but mainly because you need to keep running over to a table to switch tools. They made this less fun just to waste your time. Girl spider wakes up, girl spider kills boy spider, I think the orange lad knocks you out again, and you wake up in a classroom with the white murder teacher and the corpse of the boy spider.
I know what you're thinking, I have to be omitting some of the exposition here. Nope! The climax of the last game was this white monster trying to kill you before "Jumbo Josh" (more on him anon) incapacitated her instead, and now she's your friend apparently and is giving you instructions on how to escape Jumbo Josh's classroom. He looks in on you every minute or so and if anything is different he'll kill you. So you have a series of piss poor block moving puzzles that you have to tidy up and restart every minute or so, interspersed with the character who told you the rules of the scenario writing on the whiteboard which you need to erase, culminating in you needing to do pixel perfect jumping to catch two switches and use your absolutely terrible drone to hit some other switches. The drone (which you can direct with a remote control) could be a really nice mechanic in the hands of a developer who actually cared. As it is it handles like a helium balloon.
Some gooseberry fool happens, I don't even know, and you have a boss battle where you feed fireworks to a two headed dog. Again, this is actually vaguely competent and actually resembles a boss fight in games designed by people who don't belong in The Hague, but because everything handles terribly it's a stressful and horrible ordeal. To show you how annoying this game is - you have to open SIX doors one after another to get to this boss fight. When you have completed the boss fight you get two party hats which complete a weird Banban scarecrow thing. You then have to press a button to push this thing FIFTEEN TIMES to get it to the place where you need to scare a baby bird and execute a pixel perfect jump onto its parent which you inevitably fail and go back to the beginning of the pushing section (every push comes with a
hoo-laar-ious catchphrase so bad I turned the speakers off after the first five times). Another thing - these bird things have been by a country mile the scariest thing in this game, and with no explanation whatsoever you finish this episode
riding one of them to escape the devil Banban. And of course it ends with an elevator...
Nothing in this game makes sense. Nothing in this game is fun. I think the Roblox knock offs might actually handle better than the real thing, which if you know anything about Roblox is a
damning indictment.
And my son asked to play the fourth one tonight