Banana is a game about clicking on a banana. That’s literally it: There’s a picture of a banana, and you click on it. Somehow, it’s tremendously popular—it’s currently the third-most played game on Steam, and I will provide a picture to prove it. But it’s been lacking in one vital feature: It did not keep track of how many times you actually clicked on the damn banana.
But that is a problem no more. An update released today adds cumulative banana-click tracking to the game, so instead of resetting the counter every time the game starts, it will carry your clicks over from session to session.
Honestly, it’s baffling to me that this wasn’t in place right from the start. Because it’s important: We all click the banana for reasons entirely our own, but we share the common thread of watching that number go up. How many times did you click? How many times can you click?
It’s a bit like having your initials on the high-score screens back in the heyday of sketchy, smoke-filled arcades: It’s a litany of accomplishment, and it hurt a little bit, deep down inside, when those machines were switched off for the night, erasing that record of your deed.
Here is my deed: I have clicked my banana 1,056 times across three separate sessions. I have also equipped the Stickerbombanana skin, which I can’t figure out how to unequip without deleting it, something I don’t want to do. Why? For the same reason a cumulative click-tracker matters: I earned this! I worked hard for it (well, I clicked a bunch of times) and I’ll be annoyed if it’s taken away.
Speaking of that weird banana skin, today’s update also adds a new inventory system that enables players to directly equip new bananas and delete unwanted bananas. A workshop system has also been added to the game, so banana artistes can upload their creations and have it voted on for possible inclusion in the game.
As I mentioned earlier, Banana is tremendously popular. More people are playing it than Elden Ring right now, and here’s the promised proof:
It’s weird, right? There’s some clear suspicion in some of the Steam comments that something dodgy has to be going on—like all this clicking is somehow powering behind-the-scenes NFT generation or something. I share that wariness on a gut level, but as Harvey Randall noted when Banana first landed in May, there’s “a lack of genuine sketchiness” here. Yes, you can buy and sell banana skins for various, sometimes outrageous, prices, but all that’s getting you are more banana skins and maybe a few bucks to spend on other Steam games. Which isn’t nothing, but it’s not going to get you rug-pulled or arrested, either.
(The developers, for the record, have also denied that anything untoward is going on.)
Anyway, as simple (and silly) as all this banana-clicking is, it sounds like more and bigger updates are on the way. “We’ve been working on these updates for the past weeks and preparing the game for future updates as well, trying to restructure & learn at the same time how things work,” the developers wrote. “I hope you guys like it, and any type of constructive feedback is welcome!”
