The Bombanana Manual Explained: Who Reads It and How
Who can open it
Only the Mute Monkey. The store page is explicit: “You are the only one who can read the bomb disposal manual. If only you could tell the others what you know.” The Blind Monkey cannot read screens, the Deaf Monkey never gets the book. That is the whole design: the person with the answers has no voice.
What it looks like
An official screenshot shows a ring-bound notebook on the van’s green table, open at CABLE MODULE: a wiring diagram on the left page, a colour-and-count table on the right, and the rule underneath: “Cut the correct cable based on the number of cables connected to the module, and the color of the active light.” Every module we have seen follows the same layout — one page, one diagram, one rule sentence, one lookup table.
How a rule is keyed
Across the four demo modules the manual keys its answers to three kinds of input, and every later module reuses them:
| Input | Who supplies it | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Active light colour | Deaf Monkey (sees it) | “Light is red” |
| A count or an order | Deaf Monkey | ”Four cables”, “lights are blue, green, yellow, red” |
| A Braille number | Blind Monkey (feels it) | “The dots say seven” |
The Calculation Module adds a fourth: whether the typed result is odd or even. The Mute Monkey needs all the inputs for a page before the row can be found, which is why the callout order matters more than reading speed.
Reading it under a timer
The 10-tips video’s first tip is to read for visual keywords: as soon as the Deaf Monkey says “cable” or “red LED”, turn to that page and scan for the colour, not the prose. The manual, in the guide’s words, is “dense and filled with visual distractions”; reading a page top to bottom every time is a guaranteed loss. Agree a fixed module order (clockwise from top-left, say) so the Mute Monkey knows which page is coming next before it is called.
Signalling the answer without words
The Mute Monkey’s tools are the emote wheel, pointing, head nods for yes/no, and thrown objects. The most efficient pattern from launch-week play: the Deaf Monkey reads the candidates out loud (“first cable? second? third?”) and the Mute Monkey nods at the right one. The Deaf Monkey sees both teammates, so a nod from either the Mute or the Blind Monkey settles a question in under a second.
Languages and a known manual bug
The manual is translated into all 15 supported languages. The June 16 demo hotfix fixed “Italian language manual book white pages” and “wrong information in the Calculation Module page” — the only manual errata Lefto has published. If a rule seems impossible, first check that everyone is on the same game language.
Is there a Bombanana manual PDF?
No. Lefto Studio has not released the manual as a file, and the press kit contains only screenshots, logos and box art. Sites that offer a “complete manual PDF” are rebuilding it from play footage, exactly as this desk does on the modules page — with the difference that we quote a rule only when the page itself was on screen.
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