I have been barrelling through the Garten of Banban series of mascot horror video games these past weeks, mainly due to travelling to Australia for a month (at the time of typing). Hopefully I am still able to put up blog posts there using my laptop (I am!), this review is written four days before the long 25 hour plane journey starts. Garten of Banban VII is the first game in the series not to be released in 2023, and was the only one to be released in 2024. I also have to say it was mightily disappointing. As ever, unavoidable spoilers to follow.
After descending yet another elevator of the secret facility hidden under Banban's Kindergarten, you arrive on floor six - the domain of Syringeon. The previous floor having become overrun by Sir Dadadoo and his small army of corrupted creatures. You had fled the area with the intention of retrieving the missing piece of Queen Bouncila's magical sceptre; the only item capable of sending the giant slug and his naughty one minions back into her pouch. After finding the surgeon, he instructs you with locating Jumbo Josh, the green giant being somewhere in Syringeon's improbable city, and who the creature believes is the only one capable of stopping Dadadoo.
I have to say, I did not expect a city to be found on this particular floor of the facility. I reckon by now we must be getting on for a good half a mile under ground. After a brief but fun horror opening, you make it to the city. The rest of the game takes place in this small open world area, with you tasked with heading to various locations, such as a bar, apartment block and theatre, as you search for clues on Josh's whereabouts and find the items you need to capture him. Unfortunately, this is the most frustrating game in the series by far, frustration popped up at several annoying moments. Chase sequences are back, but there was one here that required a mix of running and pixel perfect jumps. I must have taken at least 50 increasingly angry attempts until I finally did that section. Then there is the drone, it has another upgrade that lets you control it directly. I had hoped this would make it less cumbersome to control, but alas, the controls are poor and its range is limited by invisible walls. There are also a lot less puzzles to be found here, a handful of ones that mostly revolve around memorising patterns.
The city was fine, populated by alien looking creatures who talk in a variety of languages, it wasn't anything exciting. It had a kind of 1920's American gangster type feel, the bar playing jazz music, and a misty vibe to the streets. I can't say I liked that aesthetic, for much of the two and a half to three hour game there was barely any horror to be found. You get the obligatory dream sequence which to be fair was pretty fun, but the lore here was minimal. The story of containing Sir Dadadoo started to feel like a bit of an unimportant sub plot, divorced from the bigger story of finding your missing child. I liked the twist ending, but other than that there wasn't many interesting events to be had, outside of an epic finale, and the death of a major character.
I figured that each subsequent game in the series would be better and more polished. Garten of Banban VII however felt a bit of a mess. It felt like it was too ambitious for its own good, the amount of times I encountered invisible walls during my playthrough was ridiculous, and those moments of absolute frustration really hampered my enjoyment. This was ok, but really lacked the quality of the last few games.
SCORE:
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