The Bananagame’s community is certainly, ah, creative.
If you ever crack open the SteamDB charts and leaf through the platform’s illustrious history, you might find that in May of this year, a game called Banana reached the middle of the pack on Steam’s top 100. When I sat down to look into this, it was at number 47—just four ranks shy of Cyberpunk 2077, and ranking above actual videogames such as Fallout 76, Diablo IV and Slay the Spire. You might also wonder why this happened, since Banana is a game where you click on a picture of the curved yellow fruit and do nothing else.
I wanted to know why, too. So did everyone on the UK side of PC Gamer, actually, as we sat in a morning call on a Wednesday (which I maintain is the most accursed day of the week). We stared, baffled, as tens of thousands of active players all clicked on a picture of a banana, seemingly driven to some eldritch madness by a simple image. Because my torrid work is never finished, I bravely jumped on the grenade and did a little digging—and it turns out there’s a whole genre of these things, which I’m going to henceforth dub EAIGs, or ‘egg-adjacent item games’, because I have lost my mind.