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.

Of the four titles I’ve had the chance to play I think I found this the most aggravating in terms of the setup and implementation of some of its puzzles. What’s annoying is that even when you think you know what you need to do on some level, it feels like there’s an additional hoop or two to jump through before you can see it through. What it seems the developers assumed would be intuitive for what to do, or where to go, in order to solve the problem just doesn’t seem to hold true… so you instead trial-and-error your way through to limp across the finish line, feeling robbed of time rather than rewarded. The controls and all just feel so clunky and inconsistent that finding the joy in the experience is difficult, even if you may enjoy the overall premise and promise of some scares at some point.