If you’re into the indie gaming community, particularly the indie horror game community, you’ve probably stumbled upon the colorful Garten of Banban series. (There are two entries as of the date of writing, with a third one coming up.) Even if you’ve not played the games yourself (they’re not available on consoles, but can be found in Steam, itch.io, Play Store and App Store) you might have watched your favorite streamer on YouTube or Twitch play it. Yet seemingly in almost every conversation that can be found on the internet about this game, Garten of Banban is bashed or ridiculed for one reason or another. I don’t think I have ever watched an indie game more criticized and with so few defenders despite being so viral in all my time as a gamer. Why does Garten or Banban have this reputation and is there anything that can be done to undo the damage?

For the uninitiated, let’s get into the basics of what Garten of Banban even is. To sum it briefly, Garten of Banban falls within the category of mascot horror games. This type of game has always been around, but Five Nights at Freddies is what really blew up mascot horror to the size it is now. Other mascot horror titles include Bendy and the Ink Machine, Hello Neighbor, Poppy Playtime, Roblox’s Piggy, Rainbow Friends, and the upcoming Kandyland. Unlike more traditional forms of horror, mascot horror is popular among children and highly merchandisable due to its reliance on brightly colored mascot horror icons; often these mascots look safe to parents unaware of the darker subject content (something you could never do with non-mascot old horror icons like the obviously horrific Jason or Freddy from Elm Street) and therefore toys can be easily placed in the children’s aisles of toy stores without seeming out of place. While I haven’t yet seen toys from Garten of Banban at my local Wal Mart next to the Freddy or Piggy toys, it might just be a matter of time.

The thing to keep in mind about these mascot horror games is that despite them being marketed towards children unlike traditional horror, they are still at their roots horror. The horror is usually found not in gore (the inclusion of which would make it harder to market towards children, though occasional splashes of blood can be found here or there depending on which mascot horror game you’re playing) these games instead rely heavily on jump scares and a lore which is just as horrific as any of the old traditional slasher or haunting films, often involving murdered children or employees driven to insanity. Garten of Banban is no different and is set within a kindergarten known as Banban’s Kindergarten. The kindergarten closed because several children went missing inside it. In the game, the player will take on the role of a parent (in notes, it is implied you’re playing for a mother) searching for your missing child. Throughout the events of the first two entries, the player has to evade the kindergarten’s colorful giant mascots and solve puzzles with the help of a drone as you proceed deeper into the kindergarten to solve the mystery of what happened to the children.

So where does the controversy come in? For starters, Garten of Banban was considered by many players to be a cynical cash grab due to the length of the entries and the graphical style. The first Garten of Banban could be completed easily within fifteen minutes, and it had an option on the menu to buy expensive t-shirts with the logo of Banban on the shirts. After being criticized for this cynical ploy, the developers removed the link to the merchandise store, but the damage in terms of PR had been done. The graphics of the game were also considered unimpressive, with several YouTubers accusing the developers of recycling assets instead of creating their own.

The Euphoric Brothers dev team seemed to have their critics in mind when they released Garten of Banban 2, which is much longer than the first one and has more gameplay. While it can still be beaten in under two hours (the amount of time Steam allows to have played a game before being legible for a refund) it is a big jump from the fifteen minutes of the first installment. There are also some clever puzzles and some adorable baby Opila Birds.

Another point of contention revolves around the un-scary designs of the mascots compared to other mascot horror. And sure, Banban and Opila Bird are pretty non-threatening compared to some of the other mascot design choices, but this is merely the trends of mascot horror taken to the extreme: Create a story that is objectively horrifying and grotesque, but never show much blood and cover everything with bright colors and merchandisable mascots that you can market to children. Less hated titles like Poppy Playtime do the exact same thing, though Poppy Playtime has more polished graphics and scarier voice acting, sparing it from much of the criticism Garten of Banban gets.

One last point of contention this article will cover is the other game the Euphoric Brothers made. Introvert a Teenager Simulator is a game that has been described by Banban haters as a school shooter simulator. This is not actually true, as you don’t play for the school shooter, you play for a depressed teen who gets to decide whether he’ll befriend a potential school shooter and stop the shooting from taking place, among several other endings. The game does have heavy flaws, though. Read what this Steam reviewer Nekromorg (who ended up giving the game a positive review) had to say: “There’s a plot that involves heavy subject matters such as suicide and school violence and then it has characters randomly T-posing and exploding…There’s a girl that acts all shy and apparently harbors romantic feelings for the player character and then she turns into a giant wolf, picks him up and flies with him through the night sky while lo-fi music plays.” Things like this can definitely lead someone to wonder if the Euphoric Brothers are treating the subject matter of a school shooting with the seriousness it deserves, but it’s unfair to say that the game is glamorizing school shootings or making the player side or play as one. While Teenager Simulator’s haters have every right to voice their opinion and those are opinions are valid, there are much worthier targets (as I’m sure they agree, this is not meant as a critique of people who dislike Teenager Simulator) to cancel on this subject, such as the GOP politicians who would rather ban books and video games that do anything to protect our schools from guns.

Hatred of Garten of Banban became so much that the Euphoric Brothers on March 11, 2023, the brothers announced they were taking a temporary break from Twitter. Citing death threats against them and their families, they tweeted: “To address the elephant in the room, what caused all of this is our game becoming too popular and successful for certain big figures in the part of the indie horror community. They have continuously weaponized their massive followings against us…It is sad how some of their fans follow their lead blindly with complete disregard to the morality of their actions and how genuinely awful/toxic those people are. We hope the community will wake up and change this soon…It’s worth mentioning that this is all against two brothers in school working non-stop and completely alone on a 100% personal budget. If you backtrack you’ll find that we’ve harmed no one and did absolutely nothing wrong; all we did was release a free game…We are not closing the account to prevent impersonation. Nothing will change regarding the game. Development of Banban will continue as normal. We’re not giving up on our dream.”

The Euphoric Brothers raise a good point when they mention that they’ve harmed no one. Left unsaid is that several of their competitors in the mascot horror scenes have harmed others. The developers of Poppy Playtime (a game that Garten of Banban is often accused of plagiarizing) Mob Gaming had to apologize last year after it was revealed they bullied an animator (Ethan aka Ekrcoaster on his platforms) due to him not wanting to work with them. The bullying became so horrible that Ethan checked himself into therapy. He was only fifteen when this happened. Kindly Brothers, the developers of the massively popular Bendy and the Ink Machine, fired fifty of their workers without warning, after years of a toxic work environment which included CEO Mike Wood openly insulting the hard work of his employees. Unlike Mob Gaming, Kindly Beast has never apologized or attempted to make it up to their victims. People forgive Kindly Beast because their games are high production quality, despite Kindly Beast being objectively far scummier than anything the Euphoric Brothers did with Garten of Banban.

So now we come to the second question I asked in the opening of the article. Is there anything the Euphoric Brothers can do to turn Garten of Banban’s negative reception around? I believe there is. Here is my unsolicited advice to the brothers on the strategy they can do to turn things around. It’s a three-step plan, and none of the steps involve changing the graphics to make things scarier. Here they are:

1: For now, embrace Garten of Banban’s status as a meme game that people like “ironically.” This means not blocking popular content creators like th3Badd3st (One of the largest “Bantuber” channels who was blocked by Euphoric Brothers on Twitter) just because they make fun of Banban. Take the criticism in good humor and ignore it. If you follow every item on this list, eventually, ironic love of Banban will turn sincere.

2: Don’t attempt to merchandise anything Banban (outside of the games themselves) until at least the story of Banban you are trying to tell with the mother and the missing children is complete. Let your source of income be from the people buying the game itself, not cheap t-shirts with images of the characters. It goes without saying that you shouldn’t do anything with NFT’s or microtransactions.

3: Do not kill any children within the lore of Banban. Garten of Banban is marketed towards children. It is silly, with bright colors, cute birds, and brightly colored villains that are more ridiculous than menacing. Trying to do what Scott Cawthorne successfully did with Five Nights of Freddies where he put the souls of dead children inside animatronics. Is a mistake. Every other cheap mascot horror game from Poppy Playtime to Rainbow Friends went down this road, and in the end all they did was trivialize something that should be dark and disturbing and refuse to explore the ramifications of it within their stories because they were too busy making memes and marketing their games to five-year-olds. Imagine how original, how much better it would be, if all of the children are found safe and sound by the player character? You don’t have to have the souls of dead children inside the mascots, you already have this term “Givanium” within game to explain what is keeping them alive. (Maybe Givanium is alien? I don’t know, anything is better than dead children!) Please, for the love of God and neighbor, don’t break old cardinal rule of old horror, the rule that states that no dogs or children should die in your story.

While I know the chances are slim that the Euphoric Brothers will ever read this article, I felt obligated to write this. Truth is, I’ve been thinking on Banban’s strange place in indie gaming culture ever since reading the brother’s thread explaining why they were leaving Twitter. As someone whose stories have occasionally been called cringe, I found myself relating to the Euphoric Brother’s plight… this wouldn’t have happened if they had actually hurt people like Kindly Beast did, but they haven’t, as far as I’m aware of. My upcoming book, Lola’s Haunter, will probably be self-published similar to Raven’s Dream. Yet it is a passion project, not a money grab. I truly love my ace heroine Lola and I relate to her and her adventures. I love it, and that’s what counts… because it’s good and beautiful in its own way, no matter how cringe it is, no matter how “ironic” some fans might be in their love for it. I know there are many awesome fans who sincerely loved Raven’s Dream, as there will be for Lola’s Haunter. If the Euphoric Brothers try to make a beautiful story, then even if it’s “cringe”, it will still have been worth it.