Every Friday, A.V. Club staffers kick off the weekend by taking a look at the world of gaming, diving in to the ideas that underpin the hobby we love with a bit of Game Theory. We’ll sound off in the space above, and invite you to respond down in the comments, telling us what you’re playing this weekend, and what theories it’s got you kicking around.
By all rights, this should be a column about The Drifter, the very good new “Pulp Adventure Thriller” from Real Human Basketball creators Powerhoof—a game that consumed one whole night of my life a couple of days back, leaving me bleary-eyed and blinking in the early sunlight hours as I finished its surprisingly exciting, emotionally affecting spin on classic LucasArts adventure games. (It is, among other things, one of the best-paced adventure games I’ve played in some time, frequently throwing way-in-over-his-head protagonist Mick Carter into harrowing situations involving monster bugs, time loops, and a surprisingly large number of things that want to tear him in half.) But it’s hard for me to focus on The Drifter‘s lovely pixel art, or tough-but-fair puzzle solutions, because I’m afflicted. I’ve got “Oh, Banana!” on the brain.
Apologies to anyone who just woke up a significant other by muttering those words to themselves, Pavlov’s Gorilla-style: The sound cue, from Nintendo’s incredibly fun Donkey Kong Bananza, might be the single most addictive thing about a game that continues to deliver the purest possible play even several weeks after its initial release. It triggers every time DK and his small friend Pauline come across one of those metal bananas that they’re constantly digging out of the terrain and jamming down Da Big Monkey’s esophagus, and, in many ways, serves as a more significant reward than the 1/5th of a skill point you get for actually finding one of the dang things. It’s part of the secret genius of Bananza‘s fast-moving take on 3D platforming: You’re never very far away from another dose of aesthetic pleasure while playing it, whether it’s the high-tempo tunes that activate when you trigger one of your various Bananza super modes, the adorable dance animations with DK and Pauline that play when you clear one of its brightly hued levels, or, most of all, that sweet ode to potassium-rich goodness—and those sights and sounds are just as key to the game’s reward structure as any more explicit benefits.
Rewards in video games can be tricky things. Oftentimes, they take the form of alleviating a problem the game itself imposed on you. (There’s nothing quite as insulting as, say, getting a bonus to a character’s move speed, a galling reminder that the developer was holding you back just so you’d thank them for eventually letting off the brakes a little.) Bananza is interesting in that regard because you start the game feeling powerful as hell, courtesy of being a big honking gorilla. From minute one, DK smashes up the terrain like a fuzzy wrecking ball, leaving gaping holes in the world that persist for far longer than players might be trained to expect. The game does have some rewards that feed into the play, as you unlock new Bananzas and then buff them out—getting the late-game Elephant unlock and suddenly being able to suck up whole mountains in seconds got a dark “I’m going to wreck everything” chuckle out of me. But there’s only so much it can do to empower a character that starts out so massively mighty.
Other games might lean into story to poke players along, but Bananza is largely disinterested in narrative. Yes, there’s a plot of sorts, and yes, it’s nice to see Pauline slowly develop and get over her stage fright as the game progresses. But this is a game that allows DK to answer every question about his motivation with a simple “Bananas!” and doesn’t really aspire to be more. It’s also not necessarily a game that tries to lure its players forward with new mind-bending puzzles or problems to handle. There are moments of real cleverness in the game’s design—building on the “give players extremely powerful tools and then let them break things as they see fit” design ethos that’s been percolating over in Nintendo’s Zelda games since at least Breath Of The Wild—but the actual challenges rarely amount to much more than figuring out where the right place to blast a new hole in the world will be. (When all you have is a gorilla’s big, meaty fist, every problem starts to look like a nail, as the adage doesn’t go.)
No, Bananza pulls the player forward on a beautiful tide of “What’s next?” What icy wonderland will DK and Pauline plummet into? What bizarre animal kingdom following its own weird rules? What new interaction with the game’s spritely physics engine, like finding that rainbow-hued ore that drags you up into the air when you chunk it out of the ground? And all of this exploration is tied together with those sounds and visuals, most especially the little dopamine tingles that pop every time you see a gleaming banana hiding around the corner, smash it to pieces, and hear it. “Oh, Banana!” At once wistful and lusty, a lover’s sigh and paean to gluttony all wrapped into one. It’s the sound of getting shit done, of crossing over—or blasting straight through—that next hill and seeing the new buffet of goodness spread out before you, still waiting to be smashed. It’s the heart of why the game works. Say it with me. C’mon, do it. Whisper it to yourself. “Oh, Banana!” It’s a love song to gaming itself.
