It seems very unlikely that we’ll get a new Banjo-Kazooie game from Rare and Xbox anytime in the near future. And while an impressive-looking fan-made Banjo game created in Dreams isn’t quite the sequel or remake people might want, it’s probably the best we can hope for in 2025. It’s also wildly impressive for something made in Sony’s five-year-old abandoned game maker.
On December 3, William Butkevicius, a level designer at Moon Studios, shared a trailer for Banjo-Kazooie: Mumbomania, a new non-official one to two-hour game starring everyone’s favorite bear and bird. It looks really good. According to the creator, it took about “14 months” and “800+ hours of work” to make Mumbomania. Here’s the trailer for the game, which is out now and available exclusively in Dreams on PS5 and PS4.
Impressive stuff, right? In fact, if you had shown this to me without telling me it was made in Dreams, a PlayStation-published game-creation tool from the devs behind Little Big Planet, I’d have likely just assumed this was created in Unity or something by a talented team of people. And in a way, it was created by a talented team of creators, as Mumbomania contains various assets built by other Dreams users, all of whom are listed in the game’s credits page. This was one of the coolest things about Dreams: The way it let people collaborate and made sure everyone got credit for their input.
As for the game’s plot, here’s the setup according to Butkevicius: “The bear and bird are back for their first buddy-trio adventure! Mysteriously disembodied, Mumbo joins Banjo and Kazooie to help collect, fight, and transform into a variety of strange beings.”
Sadly, because Sony never did much with Dreams, like porting to PC, the only way to play Mumbomania is to own Dreams on PS5 and PS4 and play the Banjo fan game there. If you don’t own Dreams, you can watch this walkthrough of the Banjo-Kazooie: Mumbomania to see just how much work went into making this thing look, sound, and play like an authentically Rare Banjo sequel.
