Bananonsense

About the game

Bananonsense is a word search with a single word in it. The screen is a grid of sixteen by seven letters, all of them B, A or N, with spinning bananas filling the gaps, and somewhere in it, reading left to right, is the word BANANA. Only once: the grid is built so that it never appears by accident anywhere else.

A frame six letters wide sits in the middle of the screen. Slide the grid around under it, and when you think the frame holds BANANA, press the button. You have thirty seconds per wave; get it wrong and three seconds come off the clock. The grid wraps around at the edges, so the word can start near the end of a row and finish at the beginning.

Every banana you find is rewarded with a banana saying, picked at random from almost fifty groan-worthy puns and twisted proverbs, before the next wave begins. From the second wave on, letters start to flip into spinning bananas and back, hiding what they are, and the higher your score, the more of them move at once. The game counts every banana you have ever found.

OBONO made it in 2025 for the Arduboy community's Banana Jam.

Playing it here

This is a homebrew game made for the Arduboy, the open, credit-card-sized handheld with a tiny black-and-white screen: a new game by an independent developer, not a commercial release. It runs here in Ardens, an Arduboy emulator. Click Play now and choose Game Start on the title screen.

The game keeps its running total of bananas in the emulated memory of the Arduboy, and that is kept in this browser automatically. F2 also saves the complete state of the game at any moment, and F4 brings it back. A gamepad works too.

Controls

A few things worth knowing

Start from the B. Every BANANA begins with a B. Scan the grid for Bs and check whether A, N, A, N, A follow.

Letters inside the frame stay visible. A spinning banana shows its real letter while it is inside the frame, so slide over a suspicious spot to see what it hides.

Do not guess blindly. Three seconds is a tenth of your time. A careful look is cheaper than a wrong press.

Credits and licence

Bananonsense was designed, programmed, drawn and scored by OBONO, who has been making small games for the Arduboy since 2016; the banana sayings and the short spoken "banana" are part of the game's own source. It is free software under the MIT licence. It is built with the Arduboy2 6.0.0 library (BSD licence, plus a music player adapted from ArduboyPlaytune, MIT). The licence texts are linked from this page, and the source code is in the author's ArduboyWorks repository.