My Family's Desperate Search For Pauline, aka a Review of Donkey Kong Bananza's First Hours

The Klepek's had one task this week: fight over who gets to be Pauline first.

“Is Donkey Kong Bananza out yet?”

This has been a common refrain from my five-year-old, nearly as much as “Daddy, can I use my iPad?” One of them, you might surmise, is a more pleasant question to answer than the other. On Thursday, the answer finally became yes. Both kids were excited to check it out, even if one question lingered over me: “How quickly are they going to fight over who gets to be Pauline?”  (You’ll get an answer soon enough.)

I promised I would not turn the game on until they came home. That was, truth be told, a herculean promise. Platformers are in my blood. A new Mario is a religious event. Nintendo is one of the few companies making games like this. Astro Bot and Donkey Kong Bananza in less than a year? The world is broken…but this helps me smile.

I’m going to spend hours refusing to touch a game that could be one of my favorite experiences of the past few years, even though I could obviously play a few hours on one Switch 2 profile and swap to another later? I could lie to my children without any consequences, but simply out of respect for them, I won’t play the game? Yes. Yes. Yes.

Maybe you’ll properly appreciate my sacrifice when you’re older, kids. 

The magic moment came an hour before bedtime. Pajamas are on. Eyeballs are locked.

And then…

Five-year-old: “I’m going to be Pauline!”
Eight-year-old: “So am I!”
Five-year-old: “I’m going to be it first.”
Eight-year-old: “So am I!”
Five-year-old: “No, I…”
Dad: “We’re taking turns.”

You can hear the tense exchange between the two of them in the video below:

Truth be told, I didn’t have a good answer. One child was inevitably going to feel left out. We could flip a coin, I guess, but it’d still be hurt feelings. Thankfully, I didn’t need an answer to this question during the hour we played the game before bed, because Pauline doesn’t even appear in the opening chapter of Bananza! Lucky me.

My kids were both pretty deflated, though in defeat, my eight-year-old still got a kick out of smashing everything in sight. In fact, realizing her younger sister had no interest in playing as Donkey Kong, she ripped the Joy-cons out of my hands and guided our time with the game. Most of said time was spent with me biting my lip, as I watched my daughter run through the opening bits of a video game I had been very much looking forward to playing. By “run” I mean sprint, as in skipping past every single flashing object, every collectible, every extra thing this game is chock full of. 

THIS ISN’T HOW YOU’RE SUPPOSED TO PLAY!!!!!111111 went my brain

It would be both embarrassing and required truth to say my heart skipped a few beats as she whisked past the parts of the game that usually bring me joy. “Do you want to see if…?” “Nope.” I cannot believe I’m saying this out loud, but watching her rush through felt like spoilers. Pathetic. But I said nothing and helped her with the controls.

Which speaks to Bananza more generally: it’s complex! Bananza simply would not be my personal recommendation for a kid’s first (or even second?) platforming game by virtue of how much command it demands when it comes to using the various buttons on the controller and the baseline level of difficulty fighting enemies and solving puzzles. It’s why I use the term “complex” instead of “hard.” It’s not a hard game, but it does ask a lot if you’re new! You’re better off with a recent Mario—Super Mario Odyssey looks spectacular on Switch 2—or, as was the case in my house, Astro Bot. 

It does, however, seem like a perfect game to have a couch companion shouting out where something might be hidden. They can be helpful even without a controller.

Of course, that assumes the reason your child wants to play Bananza is because they value progress. In this game, “progress” and" “fun” are not necessarily measured by pushing the story along. Demolishing the world around you is a fantastically fun task.

When we arrived at the game’s first “real” area, my eight-year-old had no interest in finding out what the next major objective was. Instead, she wanted to build tunnels.

You can hear her articulate this desire below:

Bananza has Minecraft energy.

Whereas Minecraft leaves storytelling and “what should I do next?” in the hands of the player, in recent years, Nintendo has embraced, either by chance or intention, the same design approach that’s so popular with younger players. I will not be shocked if a majority of young Bananza players make very little “legitimate” progress, and instead spend the majority of their time crushing rocks and nabbing collectibles by accident.

After an hour, it became clear we would not find Pauline. I promised that I would try to find her while they slept, but crucially, I would turn the game off and wait for them.

The things you do for family.

It didn’t take me long to push forward eventually trigger the cutscene that reveals Pauline’s stuck in a rock. In a panic, I turned the game off and hoped the game hadn’t autosaved; if my children knew I’d already found Pauline, they would be heartbroken.

Fortunately, when I turned the game on again, I was just outside the cutscene.

But I now knew my boundary box. I couldn’t go any further—but I could go back.

So over the next few hours, I dug really deep into Bananza, and found just about every secret possible. It was the kind of exhaustive search that tends to define the endgame of a platformer like this for me, when I don’t want the ride to end and convince myself that finding every shiny object is thrilling, not a chore. But because the sheer act of destructive exploration in Bananza is itself great, I took no offense at being stuck in a prison of my children’s making. Instead, it was an opportunity to look around every corner and every boulder to see what was hiding. Quite often, a lot was hiding in there.

Over and over, Bananza rewards you for going “I wonder if…?”

That night, the very complexity that gave me pause about whether my children will fully engage with Bananza became the reason I’m excited to play for many hour more.

Eventually, I (regrettably) went to sleep, too.

Nobody asked about Pauline in the morning, but before we headed to daycare drop-off, I told them we needed to gather in front of the TV and, at long last, find Pauline.

You can hear their predictable reaction below:

Full circle. Everyone was excited to discover Pauline, and everyone was excited to fight over who gets to be Pauline. [rubs temples] My hope is that my oldest will want to play as Donkey Kong, while my youngest will want to play as Pauline. Pray for me.

Dad gets the thoughtful and layered platforming experience he’s been dreaming of. My oldest gets to feel like the big sister controlling the action. My youngest doesn’t feel ashamed because she doesn’t understand the controls. A Bananza for one, for all.

Will it work out that way? I’m about to leave to pick up the kids. Stay tuned.

Have a story idea? Want to share a tip? Got a funny parenting story? Drop Patrick an email.

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Also:

• Not a huge fan of the map in Bananza. This is a game where so many things are hidden, so trouble moving the map around gives me some pause about the future.

• The platforming isn’t difficult. That said, Nintendo is a long ways away from the demands of Super Mario Sunshine. I guess the difficulty is in the 2D games now? It seems like Nintendo’s more interested in “exploration” difficulty in its 3D entries.

• Am I greedy for also wanting Mario, too? This game seems great—lovely, even. But if it came at the expense of a new 3D Mario, I choose to be selfish and pout.