Bronana is a survival bullet hell developed and published by busy bear. The game was released on Steam on 12 December 2024, and we tested it on Steam Deck.
In Bronana, the protagonist is a brave banana who faces waves and waves of snacks such as sandwiches, chips and popcorn. As with all games of this type, the plot is only incidental, while the gameplay is the core of the game.
In this case, the gameplay is pretty much the same as in Brotato. In fact, we are in a small room and we have to resist a multitude of different enemies for a certain amount of time. At the end of each wave, we will find ourselves in an empty room with banana merchants.
They will offer us upgrades in exchange for in-game currency. Once we’ve bought what we need, we can decide which reward we’re going to get in the next wave by walking through one of the three doors at the top of the room. Just like in Hades.
Bronana: I’ve seen it somewhere before
It is quite trivial to realise that whoever brought Bronana to life was so completely inspired by Brotato that they made a clone of it with a banana as the protagonist. It inherits a very simple and banal graphic design, which may have been original in Brotato, but is no longer original or pleasing to the eye.
This is not the only thing that is unoriginal, as the name itself shows. Instead of copying the name of a successful title and hoping for the same fate, it would have been better to keep the original name, First Jam. Moreover, the use of the term Pokedex to identify the book of monsters in the game is completely inappropriate.
But if it doesn’t stand out for its originality, it doesn’t stand out for its optimisation either. On the Steam Deck OLED, the game doesn’t even reach 90 fps, and in the main menu the frame rate stays below 20 fps.
Unfortunately, I can’t say that I liked Bronana. I find it limiting for a survival to only use two weapons. In addition, the menu interface is unclear, which makes it much more difficult to understand what kind of power-ups you have in your possession. And finally, as other users have also complained about in the Steam discussions, some collected items do not appear in the inventory.
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