In this current era of gaming, when publishers and AAA developers eschew risk with a strategy of licensed properties, remasters, and sequels, a new IP is a truly novel concept. The reality of that risk is not lost on this reviewer; the corpses of failed game ideas litter the digital landscape. The secret sauce mixing the new and familiar has proved elusive throughout time, but I’m happy to report that Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden (PS5, Xbox, PC) threads the needle quite nicely and provides a much-needed breath of fresh air.
French studio DON’T NOD, best known for the Life is Strange franchise, leverages its trademark choice-based narrative adventure chops with surprisingly good combat to bring this ghostly Action-RPG to a higher level than it might have achieved in different hands. Engaging stories, fantastic acting performances, a large open world with secrets galore, and enjoyable combat make for an excellent experience. Sony supplied much of the marketing push behind the game, which makes sense as it fits PlayStations’s near-patented 3rd-person action specialty like a glove.
A Ghastly New World
The story opens in 1695, with our main characters, Red mac Raith and Antea Duarte, on a ship bound for the New World (Colonial America) at the behest of an old friend. Red and Antea are lovers and partners, members of a sect known as the Banishers, working together to protect the living from the dead. Their job is to deal with ghosts, spectres, and other post-life nasties who, instead of crossing over to the afterlife, have hung around to make things hard on those they left behind.
Upon arriving in America to the town of New Eden, the pair find that their friend has gotten himself killed, and New Eden itself is in dire straits. It seems the town is struggling with a curse of unknown origins, inflicting intense suffering and horrifying dreams on the village’s settlers. Red and Antea set out to solve the mystery and soon find themselves up against the Big Bad, a convincingly creepy lass known only as “The Nightmare.” In the fight, Antea is killed and Red nearly drowns, only to be saved by a witch who entreats him to carry on with his quest to rid the land of The Nightmare’s wrath. Red soon finds that Antea is still with him; she is now the thing she was sworn to eradicate, a ghost who cannot yet move on.
These events set up the central storyline and mechanic of the game, where Red inhabits the physical world, and Antea, the ghostly world. They work in tandem to rid the town of its collective Nightmare, the afflicted settlers of their various ghosts, and decide how to deal with Antea’s untimely passing.
Despite all the hauntings, ghostly fog, and nasty creatures wandering about, New Eden and the surrounding lands are beautifully created. Though it represents only a small corner of the American Northeast, DON’T NOD has managed to create a good amount of diversity in the areas you’ll visit. Though much of your time will be spent wandering through pine forests, you’ll also end up on the beach, in the mountains, in a vast underground mine, and even in the underworld. The game does a nice job with verticality as well, treating you to some spectacular views as you ride a lenticular and climb your way to the aforementioned mines.
Navigation is a bit of a mixed bag and gave rise to one of the few less-great (I can’t even really call it negative) aspects I found across the entirety of the experience. On the good side, the game map is excellent with points of interest and quest indicators clearly marked. When you come across an item or area that requires a power you don’t yet have, the map even records their locations along with the skill it needs, a small touch that makes a big difference when you’re mopping things up in the endgame and something that is sorely missing in most Metroidvanias and open-world games.
However, getting to all these various points could have benefitted from a path marker on the map and, perhaps, in the game. The compass at the top of the HUD shows the quest marker as per usual, but it can be quite confusing to follow it correctly when you can’t take a straight path to the objective due to the impassible terrain that often lies between you and where you want to go. Trails and paths are marked on the map, but it can be easy to get turned around in the actual gameplay, especially after a fight, so you may have to regularly return to the map screen to make sure your arrow indicator is pointed in the direction you want to go.
The game world also makes heavy use of the dreaded “press X to squeeze through a tight area” convention, which may generate some annoyance from players who consider it a crutch to the technical limitations of loading in the next area. I found it to be a fair trade for the complete lack of loading screens in the open world, but your mileage may vary.
Time to Work, Banisher
With the scene set, what do you actually do in this recreation of early Colonial America? Quite a lot, as it turns out. In the main, you’ll follow the story, helping to rid New Eden’s settlers of the curse that confounds them. You do this by talking to the various parties involved with a healthy array of questions and responses that influence the way the conversation goes and how the settlers respond to you. You’ll take the info gleaned to investigate clues and use them to find the ghosts, leading to the discovery of what is driving their hauntings. You’ll perform various rituals to view events from the past, make certain ghosts manifest so that you may question them, and occasionally force a really nasty type of spirit known as a Scourge to appear in the physical world. There is some light puzzle-solving to be found in the course of the investigations, like pushing mine carts around and the like, but it shouldn’t cause too many problems for those who have played these types of games before.
True to the choice-based narrative roots of the developers, you’ll face many points in the story where you must decide how to deal with the various people, living and dead, that you encounter along the way. Will you blame or spare the living, banish or ascend the ghosts? It all plays into the central story between Red and Antea, and it all works very well. There is also a healthy amount of haunting cases outside of the golden path of the story, and these are well worth the time to experience them as those action scenes and story bits rival the high quality of the main story itself.
Banishers also has a good-sized open-world map for players to explore, with treasures to find, dark magic objects to cleanse, collectible items to grab, and more. There is no crafting in the game, but the various plants, items, and ghostly leavings you pick up will power the various rituals you must perform and provide upgrades to your equipment. You can also purchase materials, items, and weapons from the few vendor characters scattered throughout the world, but I found I didn’t need to do that even once as everything you need can be found in plentiful quantities through the run of play.
But you didn’t come here for crafting, you came here for story and action. We’ll get back to the story shortly, so let’s talk about the action, which I’m happy to say is excellent. The central game mechanic lies in the ability to switch between Red and Antea at (almost) any time you wish.
Because Antea is a ghost, she can see the spirit side of the world, able to find traces of ghostly energy that Red can’t discern. In combat, this means she does more damage to the ghosts that you fight, but she only has punch attacks as she cannot wield physical weapons. In the early game, Red’s attacks are completely melee-based, using his saber and firebane with standard light and heavy attacks, the ability to block along with an effective timing-based parry, and a dodge/dodge-roll that feels great and enhances the combat loop. I didn’t find too much need for blocking since going on the offensive was generally an effective strategy along with some timely dodging, but I’d imagine it would be quite useful at the two harder difficulty levels (there are 5 in total, ranging from Story to Very Hard).
Doing damage with regular strikes also builds up your “Banishing” gauge, and, when it’s ready to go, you can unleash a powerful attack that can one-shot some enemies and take a chunk out of the rest. Time spent knocking about the nasties as Red also fills back up Antea’s spirit meter, letting you switch back to her for continued spirit-pummeling. Essentially a cool-down timer, it still works to allow both characters their moments in the combative sun. The punches and sword slashes all feel very satisfying and meaty when they land, thanks in part to the DualSense controller’s haptic feedback, and you really feel like you’re knocking back your foes as you slice through the hordes of ghostly creatures.
A bit farther into the story, you’ll get your first gun, a musket as appropriate to the setting of the game. This is when combat really opens up and flourishes, letting you combine long-range and melee attacks into some very enjoyable combos. Some enemies can be taken out with one blast from the gun while others can be staggered, giving you an opportunity to sprint toward them and jump into a devastating heavy attack. The combat reminds me of God of War, which is absolutely a compliment, giving players everything they need to feel powerful and capable but not complicating things unnecessarily.
There isn’t a huge variety of enemies to face out there in the woods, mainly several varieties of ghosts and a lot of wolves with a few heavies thrown in for good measure. That doesn’t cheapen the combat at all, though, as the baddies scale with your improving weaponry and skills and put up a good fight all along. The boss battles really stick out in my mind, not so much that their mechanics are any different from the regular combat, but for their design and the impact of knowing the stories and pain that led them to that place. It makes the payoff all the better, and DON’T NOD is to be applauded for their design and placements in the world that make them so much more than just bigger bullet sponges.
As you progress through the game, you’ll gain XP and level up your character, opening up skill trees that center around Antea’s various abilities, called “Manifestations” here. The Skill points you get from leveling up can be used for various skills and stat buffs for both Red and Antea, and there are a lot of choices and directions you can go with them. There’s nothing groundbreaking here, but it’s a pretty robust set of skills to keep you busy.
There’s also a great set of equipment that serves both protagonists, across weaponry and passive items such as rings and brooches. Each category of equipment has twelve slots available, so it seems with my meager 2 outfits and 4 guns, for example, I only brushed the surface of what the open world has waiting for the earnest explorers out there. Each item can also be upgraded seven times with the various collectible items you pick up, awarding stat buffs with each improvement (though it’s unclear what many of the stats, such as Wrath or Persistence, contribute to the characters). It may be relatively basic and somewhat linear, but it’s perfectly implemented to give players an action-heavy experience that still rings with the trappings of the RPG genre.
Life to the Living, Death to the Dead
I promised we’d return to the story, and here we are again. I must confess that I am an absolute mark for story-heavy games; walking sims, action games, RPGs, I’ll play them all. An interesting narrative with great characters is the main reason I play games in the first place. Banishers has immediately placed itself in the highest pantheon of stories I’ve enjoyed across my 35+ years of gaming history. It’s really that good, and it simply must be played to get the full experience.
In many ways, it reminds me of The Last of Us (my all-time favorite), where so much of the connection you gain with the protagonists happens in the quiet moments when you’re walking from place to place or waiting for something to happen. Red and Antea feel just like a real couple: they reminisce, they speak sarcasm fluently, they squabble, and they say they are sorry afterward. Learning their backstories amid the narrative’s twists and turns only endears them to you all the more. Much of their dialogue sounded exactly like how my wife and I talk to each other, minus the references to banishing ghosts, of course. The writing is fantastic, and the performances by the voice actors are out of this world. They become these characters and breathe life into them, making every emotional scene and quiet moment between them equally impactful. You believe the love these two feel for each other is real, and you can feel their struggles to express how they feel to each other as their journey grows ever more perilous and closer on their way to the conclusion you choose for them.
It’s been many years since I enjoyed performances this much, but that isn’t just limited to the protagonists. Every single character I met in my 35+ hours with the game gave a solid performance, and no matter how long I spent with each of them, I really felt the impact when their stories concluded. I can’t imagine that fear and anger are easy to conjure up in a recording booth, but that’s exactly what you intuit from these besieged settlers when you question them about their troubles. You can feel their loathing for the Banishers just dripping off them as you try to pry from them the details of their lives, most riven by loss, suffering, and sickness. There’s no more fraught time for those in the voice acting profession than right now, with the looming presence of AI hanging over them. This game should serve as the gold standard for demonstrating how vital their human essence, the humanity that would seem impossible to ring from silicon chips, still remains to the quality of a game such as this.
Banishers is a beautiful game, and though not up to the level of today’s Unreal Engine 5-powered behemoths, it doesn’t need to be to accomplish the visual storytelling that goes along with the game’s top-notch voice acting. Faces are highly detailed and portray the emotions of their performances. The game world is truly gorgeous, especially the panoramic shots that show the vastness of the untamed wilderness and its natural beauty, with the kind of verticality that I love in an open-world game. The only times the visuals run into a bit of trouble are with the lighting, which can be a bit dark at times, and some occasional glitchiness when player models get close to the environments when in close quarters.
Combat runs butter-smooth in the Performance graphical mode, and only occasionally do framerates drop in the open world. Sound design is uniformly excellent, from the aforementioned voice acting to the environmental audio of the various locales. There’s a lot going on with weapon sounds, enemies, and the like across the entire sound stage, and the game handles it all quite well, giving credence to the creepiness of the journey upon which you’ve embarked.
The game boasts a high level of replayability as a feature, due to all the choices you can make across the breadth of the adventure. According to Focus Entertainment, the game’s publisher, there are 5 distinct endings possible based on those choices. The vast amount of stuff to do and find in the open world also guarantees what I would guess to be another 15-20 hours of gameplay beyond the golden story path, with all the various items to find just a small part of what you can do in the wilderness. And even though there is no end-game capability or New Game+ at the time of writing, you’ll get the bog-standard warning when you’re about to hit the point of no return, so you do get a chance to stop and do all the things you want to do.
I can’t say enough good things about Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden, and it is absolutely my early leader for Game of the Year. The story is an emotional masterpiece, owning some of the best writing and vocal performances I’ve experienced in many years. The open world sports a ton of activities and collectibles for completionist runs, along with multiple endings for those who want to exercise (or is it exorcise?) their freedom of choice. No matter which path you choose for Red and Antea, I hope you enjoy your time in New Eden as much as I did, for this brand-new IP deserves all the flowers it will hopefully receive.
Sincere thanks to Focus Entertainment for providing the review code for Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden. You can find Seasoned Gaming’s review policy here.
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