After playing quite a bit of these first four titles in the Garten of Banban series, I wasn’t quite sure how to collectively review them. Since they’re all essentially building off of the same engine, components, and characters and are all hitting the eShop together, it’s very hard not to lump them together quite a bit. Without the benefit of time and a break between each release, they feel more like a drop of multiple episodes to launch the new season of a series of some sort, so I’ve decided to cover their general composition first, and then follow up with specifics for each game in question at the end.

Once a popular preschool for happy youngsters, an incident one day where everyone suddenly disappeared has turned what was once a facility filled with happiness and good feelings into a creepy shell of what it once was. Armed with your wits, whatever tools you may be able to find, and a handy drone, you’ll take it upon yourself to explore and try to get to the root of what happened, and hopefully try to save the day. Just beware, there are still some secrets lurking about and if you aren’t careful things can go badly in a heartbeat.

Picking up at the point the first game left off, you’ll find yourself in a new setting in a facility underneath the daycare in the first one, and this time you’ll have some help… or will you? On a general level, while the environment you’re exploring and the puzzles are different from those in the original, there’s no mistaking the same general threads in the design. You’ll need to use what clues there are around you to determine the nature of what’s going on, sometimes fight with the game’s pretty clunky control mechanics to try to implement your solution, and then move onto the next. Even sequences that are meant to amp up the excitement fall a bit flat as your character more often than not feels pretty slow and incapable on the whole. While perhaps this can be fun for streamers whose viewers get into the suspense of it all, in terms of the playing it remains pretty awful.