Having someone that you truly love is one of the best feelings in the world. It’s amazing to look over at your partner and know that you are on this journey of life with them at your side till the end. Of course, there are lows, but if you are in a good relationship, there are so many more highs. Finding the right person is a thing I will never take for granted in my life.
But it can also be one of the scariest things in the world. There is a part of you that can not even comprehend that anything bad could ever happen to the one you love the most. And then, there are those moments when the most terrifying thought in the world slips through your defenses. You imagine the unimaginable happening to them, and it is terrifying beyond belief.
Don’t Nod have created a game designed to pierce through those mind defenses. They have made a game that forces you to confront losing that loved one. And with an added twist, it also makes you think about the lowest depths you might sink to in order to bring them back.
It’s a powerful concept. And Don’t Nod executes on it to perfection. While I think it would be impactful for anyone, I also think that if you have someone that you love, it hits that much harder. So many times as I played this game, I thought about my wife and how much she means to me. Seeing a love story that has to end tragically was a bit emotionally taxing at times. There were moments when it was hard to push forward. But every time, it was worth it. Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden stands as one of my favorite experiences of 2024 so far. Its story, world, and characters all hit perfectly and help overcome some combat and navigation that isn’t quite as pristine as everything else around it.
Ghostbusters… But Sexier
The heartbreaking premise of Ghosts of New Eden involves two banishers (think 1600s Ghostbusters, but a lot more serious, and no cool theme song) who are setting out to handle a ghost problem in the somewhat newly established area around Boston. These banishers are also in love. It doesn’t take long for Antea Duarte, who is also the mentor in the relationship, to die at the hands of a powerful ghost that the pair encounters early on. Her lover and pupil, Red mac Raith, sets out to banish this ghost, and then either “ascend” Antea’s spirit to the afterlife, or kill enough of the settlers in the area to have enough power to resurrect her.
The ghost that killed Antea is one of many plaguing New Eden, so on their journey, Red and Antea help the settlers of the area by dealing with their “hauntings”. This is basically when a ghost won’t leave someone alone. Investigating hauntings is the core gameplay of Banishers. Some of them are mandatory, and many are optional. Playing Banishers often feels like playing a weird sort of spooky version of Law and Order: SVU. You investigate different areas by picking up letters and other documents and hearing fragments of the past through Antea’s ghostly powers. By doing this, you discover the truth of why each ghost is clinging on to the world. These hauntings end up being consistently excellent. I couldn’t believe how many twists and turns the game would manage to pack into each and every one. There are a lot of gray areas in Banishers, and almost no one is entirely innocent.
This can make the element of choice extremely fun and exciting once you reach the end of each haunting. You can choose to kill the living settler (who might kind of deserve it in plenty of situations), you can “ascend” the ghost, which is the gentle way to do things, or you can “banish” the ghost, which definitely sends them somewhere bad. I really had to stop and think about what to do for a lot of them. These are almost all tricky decisions, but they feel oddly fun, too. Despite making tough decisions and occasionally seeing minor consequences for them, I never wanted to reload my save. They never make you feel like any of your decisions are the bad one or the wrong one, which I enjoy a lot.
The hauntings are also greatly enhanced by how incredible both Red and Antea are as characters. I love how real both of them feel. So many fictional characters have that one obvious hook that makes them memorable. These hooks are inevitably a bit over the top in most cases. Red and Antea are different. They are grounded. They aren’t “extra” in any particular way. Yet, they are still immediately interesting. They are packed with personality and deep backstories. The game smartly doesn’t just dump these backstories right on you either. They are brought out slowly and subtly, once again, in very natural ways that feel like real conversations. Most importantly, their love feels real, which is a big reason why the main story is also so engaging and intense. The top tier voice acting sells you on that love, and the performances by Russ Bain and Amaka Okafor do wonders at selling both of the main characters and their relationship.
The strong acting and writing carries over to pretty much all of the inhabitants of New Eden. This, combined with surprisingly fantastic art direction (I mean, I was told this was an AA game!), made me fall in love with exploring New Eden.
However, I would have loved being in this world so much more if I felt just as immersed with the combat.
Serviceable is… Something… I Guess
Let me preface this by saying that I definitely don’t hate the combat. But it really can not be described much more positively than “serviceable.”
The biggest hook to combat in Banishers is that you can switch between Red and Antea almost whenever you want. You only get a game over if Red runs out of life (Antea’s health slowly ticks away no matter what and you switch to Red when she runs out), so your general goal is to build up Antea’s meter with Red’s attacks, and then stay as Antea for as long as possible. Antea is also a bit more fun to play as once she gets all of her skills as she has several more options than Red. She can string together multiple different damaging skills that all feel great to use. But she doesn’t have a parry or a strong attack, so putting together basic combos with her can get kind of dull.
Meanwhile, Red does have slightly better combos and a parry and dodge skill, but other than that, he is very basic, and doesn’t have tons in terms of cool special attacks (minus his banish ability, which builds kind of slowly anyway). It felt like both characters were sort of half-made. If all of their skills were combined and you didn’t have to switch between them, I actually think combat might have been more fun.
Despite my complaints, I still enjoyed Banishers combat in spots from a “mindlessly fucking things up is fun” perspective. If you stick with normal difficulty, you get a fair bit stronger than most enemies the further in you go. Usually I prefer a bit of a challenge, but making Antea do a super dash from far away into a foe, then doing an explosive area of effect move, and then switching to Red for a couple of finishing blows never got totally old. The game makes you feel powerful in cool ways, and that is important.
I have similarly mixed feelings about navigation in the world. Banishers is an open world video game of sorts… except it doesn’t really have many open areas. You spend almost all of your time on very tight and rigid paths, which also happen to be very twisty. Trying to keep on the right path with all the twisting and turning can get a bit annoying at times. Though I will admit that sometimes this map design can lead to rewarding feelings when you do find your way to the many little treasure chests and other goodies that the game tucks everywhere.
Some areas aren’t all that bad, at least. It’s just in certain spots in particular where things get really bothersome. Either way, I did often find myself wishing that more areas had spots where you just got to go straight for more than 10 seconds.
The game also throws some little environmental puzzles at you in its world, and I actually found these to be a lot of fun. One in particular has you trying to shoot multiple targets to eliminate roots that block your path in spots. Watching these roots disappear never fails to be incredibly satisfying. It also manages to be a fun challenge without ever getting frustrating. They remind me a lot of the axe throwing puzzles in God of War that were also a lot of fun.
There are also tons of optional arena fight type challenges on the map where combat has special rules. These are one of the best ways in the game to increase your stats, and while I certainly didn’t find these to be enough fun to do more than half of them, I did mostly enjoy them. The exceptions being the ones that have pretty annoying rules that force you to spam the same attack over and over because nothing else is effective.
Knowing What is Important
Luckily, every time I was getting just a bit too annoyed with the combat or the navigation, I’d reach a point where the story would suck me right back in, or I’d find a haunting that would suddenly have me enchanted for a half hour. The combat, in particular, is spaced out well enough where it never feels absent but also never gets to the point of making me hate it. Which is smart given that the systems in place are mostly average.
And as troublesome as navigation could be, it sure helped to make me feel better when I’d catch a gorgeous or spooky view and bust out the photo mode. I spent a whole lot of time in photo mode in this game, and I was having a blast with it. Every photo in this review is from me, and while I’m no pro, I was pretty pumped by how many of my photos turned out looking pretty neat. That just showcases how strong the art direction is in this game, as they constantly turn out some absolutely stunning scenes.
In the end, for any misgivings I have with Banishers, it nails everything except those few elements in a way that forces me to still give it a very strong score. I truly had that much fun playing it. Eventually, the amount of aspects of the game that I view as a 10/10 overcome the fact that combat is more like a 7/10. I’m sure some will disagree with this view. There are plenty of games where I would not be able to completely overlook this, but Banishers executes at such a high level in so many ways, that I still think it is a 9/10, and it now enters the pantheon of games that I do not expect to fall out of my top 10 games this year. When a game can make you feel something the way this one does, it deserves recognition, as simple as that.
Now excuse me while I go hug my wife.
Score: 9.0/10
Big Nerd Gaming 
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