Bananner Nababber: in Neo-Tartaria, the final boss is a crypto-mining operation
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Boss duel after boss duel, in a game half the players call a fair challenge and the other half a trap built to irritate.
A drunk in debt against the crypto apocalypse
Harry Pippels is drinking sprutzels and running up a tab in a Neo-Tartaria bar when he learns that the Elder Demon has diverted the population's entire power supply into mining cryptocurrency, with the Tartarian winter closing in. At his side is Humpty-Ho, the imaginary friend who keeps him company through the drinking and then through the brawl. The game poses one question and never answers it: what, in the end, is a Banana Nababá?
There are no ordinary levels, only duels, one after another, against ten bosses of rising difficulty. Just one fighter is available at the start; the other five turn up as the player digs out a hidden item in each boss's arena, and those same items decide which ending runs after the credits. Every fighter comes with its own weapon and its own ability, which makes some of them far more useful against certain bosses than others.
The look is retro, built on thick outlines and saturated colours that recall old consoles. That choice has a side effect not every player forgives, as becomes clear further down.
The update the studio called its final word
In May 2023, the studio Lazrool pushed out a new boss named Chip Potato, along with per-character time records and a cheat code for anyone who wanted to slip past the nastiest stretches.
February 2025 brought the post the studio calls its final update: more bosses, difficulty tuning, a new secret ending, slightly polished visuals and, for the first time, instructions on how to play. The game had never taught its own rules, and anyone who wanted to learn learned by losing. The same post promises nearly forty achievements, which the studio's own wording describes as disappointing.
Learn the pattern and two fighters will do
The players who recommend it land on the same lesson: learn the boss's pattern and the win takes care of itself. One player who reached 12 hours of play says he beat almost every boss with just two of the available fighters; the snail, the axe guy and the bubble maniac were next to useless to him. Another, with 77 hours logged in August 2022, points the game at anyone who has been through Cuphead and understands what a string of boss duels involves: his tip is to hunt the hidden items in each stage, because some fighters make certain bosses far easier, and for players who finish more than once they open up an ending most people never see.
A player with 36 hours of play, in March 2023, sets out what works and what doesn't. The controls are simple and the sense of progress is real, but the heavy palette of the retro art sometimes hides the boss's own attack in the middle of the screen, and the player registers the blow only when it is too late to react.
The most recent entry, from September 2026 and all of 1 hour of play, puts the same lesson another way: the fights follow clear patterns, the inputs answer fast, and losing turns into learning rather than empty frustration, while the absurd humour about crypto demons and bananas helps the difficulty go down.
A wall, not a learning curve
Those who walk away early tell much the same story. One player, with zero hours on record in August 2022, says the difficulty turns into a sheer wall at the very first boss. Another, also without a single hour logged, writing in November 2022, frames the problem as intent: the game does not want to teach, it wants to needle, and he reckons only two kinds of player get anything out of that, the sort obsessed with memorising challenges and the sort who never notices the needling.
A longer piece from January 2025, after 4 hours of play, calls the retro art careless and argues that punishing difficulty is no synonym for fun, recalling that games like Terraria and Stardew Valley won out despite their simple graphics, not because of them.
A player with 6 hours, in July 2023, says every level felt impossible without falling back on the regeneration code, the same cheat the studio handed out alongside the boss Chip Potato. None of these accounts denies that the game understands what it wants to be; what they deny is that it is worth the irritation needed to get there.
Who makes peace with the irritation, and who doesn't
Bananner Nababber does not miss the difficulty mark by accident: the difficulty is the point. Players who enjoy memorising a boss's moves, running the fight again and feeling their reactions go automatic will find a generous duel here, with alternative fighters and a secret ending tucked behind items that reward anyone who comes back after the credits.
Players who need to see the incoming blow clearly, or who expect some reward beyond the next boss, whether more content, more variety or a story that moves, will hit the same wall that pushed out the ones who quit with the loading screen still warm. Harry Pippels's bar tab is never what the game is really about; what it is really about is whether the player accepts losing many times over in order to learn to win.