Garten of Banban

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Garten of Banban is a first-person survival puzzle indie horror game developed by the Euphoric Brothers, which was released on Steam, the Google Play Store, the Apple App Store, and indie game holder itch.io on January 6th, 2023. The plot revolves around a mother who trespasses into the kindergarten to find her lost child among the gaudy creatures inhabiting the school.

Garten of Banban
Your pancreas is best kept to yourself than given to this rip-off.
Genre(s): Puzzle Indie Horror Platform(s): Steam Google Play Store Apple App Store Itch.io Roblox (in addition to having this game, there is also a roleplay version) Nintendo Switch PlayStation 4 PlayStation 5 Xbox One Xbox Series X/S Release Date: January 6th, 2023 May 30, 2024 (PS4/PS5) June 20, 2024 (Switch) June 25, 2024 (Xbox One/Xbox Series X/S) Engine: Unreal Engine (except Roblox) Roblox Studios (only Roblox) Developer(s): Euphoric Bros. Publisher(s): Euphoric Bros. Country: United States Successor: Garten of Banban 2

The game has been criticized by critics, reviewers, and the general public to be a rip-off of the hugely popular, but infamous Poppy Playtime, as well as being an unoriginal cash-in on the mascot horror genre in general, thanks to its “colorful characters gone bad” premise that is carried over in the future chapters and its rushed development.

Why It Should Be Banned from Kindergarten

NOTE: Many of these issues are present in the first and second chapters.

1. As stated above, the game was only made to cash in on Poppy Playtime and the mascot horror subgenre as a whole, which ends up making the game very predictable because of this. Some similarities include, but are not limited to:
   • Usages of a children’s setting (a toy factory/a kindergarten).
   • A hostile monster chaser (Huggy Wuggy/Opila Bird).
   • An overarching story arc that lasts over multiple parts.
   • Overpromotion of merchandise to boost sales (both games had a button that advertises their merchandise).
2. Compared to other indie horror games like Five Nights at Freddy's and Poppy Playtime, many attempts made at being scary here fall horribly flat. The jumpscares simply consist of the chaser screaming at the shaking camera, but none of the enemies show emotions nor even trying to kill you. Sometimes, the jumpscares don’t even work properly.
   • To add salt to the wound, all the games in the Five Nights at Freddy's franchise (especially FNAF4) are well known for having very terrifying jumpscares. For example, even though the first FNAF game has cheap jumpscare animation, it's still scary enough to almost give anyone a heart attack. It's 2D, but 3D make-believe, and it was made 8 years before this garbage.
3. Much like its inspiration, instead of being a unique game with new chapters added throughout updates, it's subdivided into more games that cost money, each one being about a different chapter, making the devs incredibly lazy.
4. The character designs in themselves are very unoriginal. If you look very closely at the characters used in the promotional posters, they're obviously AI-generated images; the characters are straight-up copied from the images, which may result in copyright infringement. This is very noticeable with the design of the Chief Pigster, which is obviously a copy of King Leonard/King Pig from The Angry Birds Movie.
5. The models of the characters may be very unfriendly for your computer as some of the polygons on the characters are estimated to have over 200,000 polygons each. To make matters worse, this YouTube short from a Brazilian YouTuber claims the models look and obviously like the developer used a camera to scan a statue, hence why it has so much detail. Such a number of polygons would crash the game, or even worse, destroy your PC. Not even the remote control of all things is safe from this.
   • On that topic, most of them, except maybe Opila Bird, are poorly animated, making very static movements and running as if they were ragdolls. This is obvious in the part from the third chapter in which you ride a blue Opila as Ban Ban pursues you.
6. Speaking of character models, some are horrible, like Captain Fiddles, according to the YT short mentioned, he claims that he looks like Grimace (one of the mascot characters from McDonald's) cooked in a microwave for 2 minutes. The worst offender of this is Opila Bird, mostly due to her large, bloodshot, bulging eyes, especially when she's staring right at you.
7. One minigame that involves shooting fireworks from the cannons at the wall buttons indoors, no less, is a very stupid idea because something like that would potentially set the whole school on fire.
8. The developers simply only cared about the money or possibly even the attention from YouTubers when making the game; when the game was still fresh, it had an aforementioned button that would redirect the player to their merch store. Recently, however, the redirect was removed from the game, possibly due to consumer complaints.
9. Even though the game is free, it may not even be worth the download because the gameplay spans over a 10–15-minute time slot. The average video game can last over 6-12 hours when played in one sitting, so you may not be getting your time’s worth at all while playing this game.
10. Quanity over quality: Each and every time a game in the series is released, a new one is announced AND released in a short time span of a few months. When the first installment was released, the second one was announced and released exactly 56 days after the first game. Games, even bad ones, take a lot of time to make, but when you take literally less than two months to make and finish your game, you almost certainly know it’s going to get panned, and if that's the case, it even further proves how rushed the game is.
    • Heck, even Mob Entertainment released a new chapter of Poppy Playtime once a year or two and they even made a good decision of delaying the third chapter of the game, Deep Sleep, in order to give it more polish.
11. Despite the sixth chapter being released on December 20, 2023, Chapter 5 has still yet to see a release date. Whether the developers skipped the fifth chapter intentionally or inadvertently is up for debate.
12. The Euphoric Brothers themselves have had a problematic history, but their most shocking highlight is the fact that in 2021, the developers created and publicly released a game that revolves around the premise of a school shooting, which is very offensive and insulting to school shooting victims and survivors alike.

Redeeming Qualities

1. The game has an almost "so bad, it’s good" status, due to the laughably bad assets, underwhelmingly cheesy characters, and overall botched-up layout of the game. It’s almost as if you want to have a good time, get a bunch of friends, and laugh at the sheer absurdity of the game.
   • In recent months, the game has acclaimed an ironic fanbase consisting of people "defending" the game and making their own memes about it. However, that fandom has been criticized for giving the game a boost of unwanted attention.
2. Unlike most games released on Steam, at least the first game is for free similar to Poppy Playtime's first chapter, A Tight Squeeze.
3. While this game and its sequel were mixed, its third installment was a massive improvement.
   • And speaking of which, we hope that the Euphoric Brothers would fix the mistakes, bugs, and errors in this game and its sequel in the next update.

Trivia

• Many profesional 3D model makers remade the characters but with less polygons. For example: a Spanish game developer and 3D modeler called DEValen remade (and/or in his words, "optimized") some of the characters from Garten of Banban with less polygons than the game uses, making it PC-friendly and can be bought at his Gumroad page. One good example is Opila Bird which looks pretty accurate to the original model.
• YouTuber and indie game developer UniqueGeese released the game publicly as Garten of Banban: Reincarnated, though the Euphoric Brothers requested that he rename it to simply Reincarnated as to avoid confusion. The game can be found here.
  • Due to Reincarnated's popularity, UniqueGeese recently made his own mascot horror game, Indigo Park, which was released on May 18, 2024, to overwhelmingly positive reviews.

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