Here’s something you may not have noticed about what can happen when DK dies in Donkey Kong Bananza

Donkey Kong Bananza has a special death Easter egg that you may not have noticed. We at least didn’t know about it initially, and in looking into this, it seems a bunch of other players were unaware as well.

We’ll be going into light spoiler territory, so keep that in mind before proceeding. We’re not covering anything story-related, but we will reference one of the final layers in the adventure.

When your hearts drop to zero, it turns out that a gold statue of DK can be left in place – sometimes at least. You can actually go the exact spot where you die and smash up the statue to recover a bit of gold.

The one tricky thing is that we’re not sure if this is somewhat random. Thus far, we’ve not been able to nail down the exact formula to get a statue to always spawn in every layer. As far as we’re aware, it doesn’t work in challenge areas.

The most success we’ve had is dying in the last layer in the spiky area you normally surf on to progress. However, we’ve seen reports of the statue appearing in other layers as well. One player shared a screenshot of it happening in Hilltop, but we weren’t able to replicate it (at least not currently). Others also saw success in the Forest and Feast layers.

As we were looking into this, we were surprised by how many players didn’t know about the gold statue Easter egg in Donkey Kong Bananza. But then again, it makes sense – many complete the game without dying and the statue doesn’t appear to always spawn. 

Is this new information to you, or did you come across the gold statue during your playthrough? Let us know in the comments.

Thanks to Jake for the tip.