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.

This opening chapter of the series is a bit disorienting at first, quite honestly, and while I have no doubt the developers had thought everything like how to make use of your drone would somehow be intuitive, I’d beg to differ. Honestly, the write-up the games have in the eShop are more informative and helpful about the “lore” of the game than playing it yourself, as aside from a scant few notes you’ll find and sloganeering on the walls you don’t have much to work with. Once you work out how to use your drone the “puzzles” with it aren’t very interesting, and the others are quite ordinary as well, more designed to slow you down than challenge you. Even in terms of the scares, there isn’t much payoff here in the game’s pretty brief runtime, leaving a pretty weak first impression for how this will shape up as a series.