When I started this series, I went into it with the understanding that it’s statistically impossible that every unplayed game I own on Steam would be so immersive and of such high quality that I would voluntarily lose hours upon hours of my life playing it. I knew I would often encounter games that were nothing to write home about. I’d definitely consider my subject today to be one such game. You know what they say, though: “When life gives you overripe bananas, make banana bread.” What we’ve got here is Banana Hell: Mountain of Madness, developed and published by Petriheart.

There are three things about Banana Hell: Mountain of Madness that will likely tell you exactly what we’re dealing with here: Its most prominent user-defined tag on Steam is “rage game,” its base price on Steam is 99 cents, and I only added it to my library because it was recently given away for free and I was morbidly curious. What I’m getting at is that Banana Hell: Mountain of Madness is a gimmick game designed from the ground up to be overreacted to by YouTubers and Twitch streamers. The term “rage game” indicates it’s a game not unlike Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy.

Banana Hell: Mountain of Madness is a game whose only goal is not to be finished by the player, but to make the player increasingly angry for the enjoyment of their online audience. Banana Hell: Mountain of Madness was clearly not intended to be considered for any worthwhile game industry accolades, except perhaps “best cheap game that made a YouTuber extra thankful for being sponsored by a brand of throat lozenges.” Now that I’ve established that, it’s time for us to take the closest, most serious look we can at a game that’s pretty darned far from being serious.

Banana Hell: Mountain of Madness is a platformer in which your ultimate goal is to climb to the top of a mountain and retrieve a red diamond. You play as Banana Johnson, who’s either a man in a banana costume or an anthropomorphic banana with (very unkempt) human limbs; I genuinely can’t tell which. Either way, he’s clearly in dire need of psychiatric help. Perhaps he knows that, and he thinks climbing that mountain and grabbing that diamond will keep the lads in the white coats from catching him, or maybe I’m just putting way too much thought into this whole situation.

Regardless, the platforming controls are probably exactly what you’d expect from an obvious “gimmick game” like this. Banana Johnson doesn’t gain momentum when running; he maintains the same speed and doesn’t jump nearly as far as it might look like he does. This means you’ll likely only figure out when to jump after some amount of trial and error. Given the shape Banana Johnson is in, though, I’m honestly impressed that he’s capable of jumping at all. There are enemies to contend with, but they don’t damage you: All they do is knock you a good distance forward or backward.

That will likely cause you to fall and lose most (if not all) of the platforming progress you’ve made. All of that combined is what makes the whole “rage game” gimmick most obvious. Every so often, Banana Johnson will say something that’s likely intended to be some of that “wacky, random humor” I’m told the youth tend to like. As you might expect, however, none of what he says is worth more than a single dry chuckle at best. Honestly, most of what he says just makes me feel increasingly bad for him and reinforces my belief that he needs prompt mental healthcare.

There are also frequent errors in the in-game text that pops up when Banana Johnson says something. Acknowledging those errors doesn’t even make me feel like I’m “being that guy” for once. I figured grammatical errors would be par for the course in an obvious “streamer-bait” game like this. I’m reminded of Ampu-Tea, a similar gimmick game I’ve covered in this series. Ampu-Tea had the saving grace of obtainable trading cards I could sell on the Steam Community Market. In that sense, at least I got Banana Hell for free. Who says I never look on the bright side of things?

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