So, I’ve been playing Donkey Kong Bananza.
It’s an immaculately designed game, full of both ambitious ideas and the proper affordances to make them approachable. The developers have crafted fascinating levels and their mastery of complex 3D terrain is indisputable. The game has fluid, elaborate movement that lets players freely climb most surfaces or chain together techniques to fling themselves across gaps, which is great fun.
Bananza comes from the designers of Super Mario Odyssey, the most recent 3D Mario title, which has been occasionally critiqued for having too many of its primary collectible item. I didn’t share that criticism at the time, and I assume the developers also disagreed, because Donkey Kong Bananza doubles down. They’ve built dense, lavishly complex worlds of destructible terrain, tucked collectibles into every conceivable nook and cranny, then somehow conceived of more nooks and crannies to put more collectibles in. It’s genuinely impressive how well they’ve constructed these 3D spaces.
But… I wish I liked this game more? Or maybe less, alternatively. I’ve stumbled into a completionist impulse that I can neither justify nor fully explain. The game is filled with flashes of brilliance, but even a lot of its clever design winds up rendered into mind-numbing fluff that leaves me disappointed.
Across its dozen or so levels, Bananza has nearly 1500 collectibles, consisting of “banandium” gems and hidden fossils stamped around the world. I keep circling back to prior levels to track them all down, exchanging resources for map markers indicating items I’ve missed (an admittedly elegant solution). It’s taking forever, but instead of abandoning this quest, I’ve been putting on podcasts and plugging away. Annoyingly, the game has achieved a seamless blend of clever puzzle platforming challenges and shiny, brain-off, button-spamming nothingness.
Now, I am aware of my own habits. I regularly begin games with a meticulous approach only to falter later on, either putting them down or sprinting to the finish. My completionist ambitions arise despite myself, and they’re often something to be shed when the time is right rather than clung to. Earlier this year, I played Demon Turf, Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo, and several others exactly like this, each time eventually giving up on the 100% Life and satisfying myself with end credits.
But with Bananza, I can’t shake it. And the texture of the gameplay only makes it worse; to put it simply, Bananza is a monkey game for monkey brain gaming. It provides near-constant dopamine through its collectibles and its abundant primary resource (gold ore). This pursuit is accompanied by an onslaught of visual glitz and an invitation for rapid inputs; you’ll spam buttons to punch through terrain, mash the “clap” button locate nearby collectibles with radar pulses, and burst through veins of gold that shower the world with shiny globules to collect. Everything’s bright, colorful, and toyetic. I suppose there’s also some other nonsense happening along the way, something with talking rockfolk, animal transformations, a girl who’s shy about singing, and- OH, BANANA.
The 3D platformer scaffolding of the game does largely hold. The bits of story and dialogue writing are unremarkable but clearly crafted with love. There are boss fights, story-related MacGuffins that gate level progress, special abilities, and so forth. It’s not just nonstop bashing and bananas. But the amount of visual and tactile stimulus is so escalated that it feels like profound spectacle inflation, a sharp uptick from Super Mario Odyssey's mere moons and coins.
Bananza's design insists on avoiding dull moments and, more importantly, avoiding any lingering moments at all; the delightful (finding cleverly hidden collectibles) and the dull (smashing through layers of terrain to get somewhere) are all stirred together into a stew, where everything happens explosively and briefly. Most banana collectibles gesture at intended ways to find them, but a huge amount can also be found by just randomly spamming DK’s radar pulse and then digging your way out to them, a tool that becomes largely automatic since it's the same way he collects nearby gold.
It’s very old-man-yelling-at-clouds of me to say this, but it does remind me of TikTok, of YouTube shorts, of Twitter feeds. It's a game for the modern attention economy, reminiscent of short-form, rapid-fire pieces of digital popcorn that form the “just scrolling” entertainment that all of us get sucked into. Bananza is built with so much more intention and care than this, but the produced effect is still one of rapid attention shifts, tiny bursts of feeling and interest that are quickly moved on from. The bright colors and cascades of glittering gold reduce clever design to a vapid vividness.
I expect to finish this game. The psychological conditioning works; I want those damn bananas. If remain untethered from my own will, I may even 100% it. The later levels are honestly better! They corral DK through them in more interesting ways and expand on the interactions between the terrain materials he slings about. But it took so long to get here, and its still driven by so many empty collectibles that fail to excite me. I’m curious (or maybe apprehensive) to find out if I'll manage to abandon my completionist quest.