Banana For Scale review: a meme turned VR game

Yesterday, in my weekly roundup, I told you about an Italian indie VR game called Banana For Scale, developed by Hypothermic games (a team including VR community member Marco Giammetti). This game managed to get the top spot as the most upvoted post of the week on /r/virtualreality subreddit, thanks to a very catchy trailer, and this intrigued me a lot.

Today I managed to get a free key of the game (thanks Marco) so that I could review it. How many bananas will score this game in my evaluation?

Banana For Scale

The game is clearly inspired by a very well-known meme of the internet folklore, where you portrait a banana in a picture to give the sense of the scale of the other objects contained in the photo. The banana has surged as the new measurement unit of the web (still better than the Imperial System)

Of course, the game aims at being funny, mixing two things we love, that is memes and virtual reality. Let’s see how it does work.

Gameplay

This is not the game that aims at being the new Asgard’s Wrath, but it just wants to be simple and funny. And in fact, it has very few rules, and you can learn how to play it pretty fast.

In the beginning, you can choose the length of your gaming session (5, 10 or 15 minutes). Then you press the start button, and one object appears in front of you. At this point, you have to understand how much it is high, of course in bananas measuring units, in the shortest time possible.

You can choose whatever method you want: you can do some guessworks; you can use two bananas in your two hands stacked alternately so that to go from the floor to the height of the object; you can use a single banana and a marker with which you draw where you arrived with your latest measurements. Everything is legit in this game, but your means are just your hands, lots of bananas and a marker. Use the McGyver inside you, and measure the objects in banana scale!

To get the bananas you have to push a button on a banana dispenser, that has infinite fruits inside (and that luckily don’t ask you to pay for them). You can use as many bananas as you want to take the measurements, and when you’re sure about the height of the item in front of you, you have to throw that exact amount of bananas inside a big pipe that leads to a banana collector. If the amount is correct, then you’ve won, and you can go to the next object. If it is wrong, you have another possibility of guessing the height of that object, before your answer is considered definitely wrong, with the game going to the next item anyway.

Some of the items the game will give you will be pretty short, while others will be so high that you aren’t tall enough to put bananas over there. To help with this, there is a special banana remote controller, that you can use to move the object downwards into the ground. This way, you can, for instance, measure a tall totem in two stages: at first, you measure the upper part (that you take down close to the floor using the remote) and then the lower part (the one that is naturally in front of you).

The dispenser sometimes will give you special types of bananas (ice banana, fire banana, TNT banana, etc…) that add a bit of variety to the game.

When the time is up, you see your score, your rank and also a sentence that gives you some facts about bananas.

You can watch all of this in the 10+ minutes of gameplay (with some first impressions of mine) contained in the video here below!

Special game modes

The game also features two different game modes apart from the single-player match described above:

• Tutorial: a floating banana will give you textual hints on how you must play the game, teaching you the basics before you start a real match;
• Multiplayer mode: in multiplayer, a player on PC and a player on VR challenge each other in this fun game. I haven’t been able to try it, because due to coronavirus I was alone in the office.

Graphics

The graphics are the best part of this game: the game is set in a tropical place, and has a very funny cartoon style that is perfect for a game inspired by a meme. I loved them, they really provided me a fun vibe regarding the game, exactly as you can see in the trailer. They’re colorful, full of animations and very pleasant to be in.

I liked also the attention to the details: since the game is about bananas, your hands are the hands of a monkey; if you take too many bananas from the dispenser, they will mash up; the bananas have a sticker of the game that reminds the one of the Chiquita; and so on.

Also, I want to underline the fact that I found lovely that there is the special marker that you can use to draw on whatever surface it touches.

Comfort

This is a roomscale game, that you play with no locomotion, so everyone can play this game.

My suggestion is that you have a quite big play area, so that you have more freedom in going closer to the object you are measuring and use the marker even if it is a very curved surface.

Interactions & design

If the graphics are the best part of Banana For Scale, player interactions is probably the worst one.

There are three problems in this game, that make it a bit frustrating.

The first one is that the player has little guidance. At first start, I had to select the tutorial myself, and when the tutorial started, I was puzzled as well by the explanations. The tutorial just gives some hints, while it should completely guide the player on first use. Anyway, since the game is very simple, this is not a big deal.

The second problem is due to the fact that the game is always the same. Yes, there are some modifiers here and there, but more or less you have always to take bananas, measure stuff and then input the number. There’s no sense of progression in this game.

The third and biggest problem is in the mechanism that you use to provide your measurements. While measuring with bananas is funny, inputting the final result is not. If you want to tell the system that the height of that ship is 20 bananas, you have to go to the dispenser on your right, press the button, grab two bananas (one per hand), rotate to your left, and throw them into the collector. This for 10 times, since you have to take 20 bananas. And after that, maybe you discover that the number is wrong, so you have to repeat all the process from scratch just to input “19 bananas”. It’s very tiresome, a bit like a fitness game.

The thing that I liked of the interactions is that they give some kind of satisfaction: measuring objects using the bananas is weird fun, and pressing big colored buttons to make things happen is satisfying as well.

Final impressions

As I say in my Youtube video linked above, Banana For Scale is a great game to create online videos and GIFs in VR. Due to its superb graphics and funny theme, it is the perfect title to create VR memes and short videos to share on social media.

As for the gameplay, I think that the idea is very original and cool, but it should be modified a bit so that to remove frustration (especially in the collection of bananas) and add some variety to the game.

I think that this game is more fun to be played in a room full of friends: it is the classical party game, where you can play with friends and have fun stacking bananas together, with everyone mocking the other ones. This idea of mine is reinforced by the fact that the game adds a good spectator mode on your 2D display while you play in VR. This is probably the ideal territory for Banana For Scale: it can add lots of fun to parties. I hope the developers take the concept even further, making people cooperate in measuring objects in VR just using bananas.

If you want to have fun with Banana For Scale, you can find it on Steam for around $12. Let’s sustain VR indie devs!