Bombanana!🔗

Yesterday, two of my friends and I played through Bombanana!'s demo. It's a cooperative bomb defuse video game in which you play one of three monkeys. They are a group, just like their three wise relatives in the Japanese tradition: one is deaf, the other is mute, the third is blind yet they are anything but wise. The mute one reads the defuse manual to the other two, the deaf one proxies the messages in the team, while the third monkey tampers with the bomb blindly.

And of course, the clock is ticking.

The good things🔗

The three of us played Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes! (KTaNE) before, which we liked, but it was more of a two-player game, and we had to take turns.

Bombanana! adds an exciting twist to the same recipe, adding a third player while restricting the communication between the players. It's also great that it removed any language-dependent content from the manuals, although KTaNE provided translated defuse manuals, which were fair enough.

The game also ran flawlessly on my Linux, which is another good thing. It handled all audio devices excellently. And the whole installation was 252 MB!

Areas of improvement🔗

There were some things that were odd, but perhaps they will be fixed in the final version.

The game burdened my GPU by running at 150 FPS, which is unnecessarily high, and there was no built-in limiter. I would have appreciated a borderless-fullscreen setting, too.

Gesturing as the mute monkey is quite limited and overcomplicated, some hotkeys would help here, or a flatter menu with a more transparent background.

Replaying levels seemed to give the same bomb, fully or partially, perhaps a procedural puzzle generation would help more. On the other hand, I experienced it as the mute monkey, so I couldn't abuse it by quickly repeating the last attempt's solution to my friends from memory.

The overall impression🔗

Despite its small size, the game was exciting. I don't remember enjoying multiplayer games this much since we played Among Us during the lockdown in 2020.

Of course, your experience depends on whom you are playing together. We are friends and were members of the same R&D team at Nokia. The game re-evoked the mood that the best and most exciting professional challenges we faced together created back then: we helped each other through mistakes and learned from them, and even created our own signals and communication rhythm in the game to speed things up.

No negative feelings, just lots of laughter, flow and a hyperfocus.

It made me relive precisely the feeling I loved: working and playing with them together.

The original version of this post is part of the Blaugust 2026 series on my blog along with:

• Blaugust 2026