HomeReviewsBanishers: Ghosts Of New Eden
Banishers: Ghosts Of New Eden review: an accomplished and emotional action adventureReader, I actually cried
Reader, I actually cried
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Focus Entertainment
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Focus Entertainment
“Banishers took a while to kick in,” I wrote in the RPS group chat last week, “but I fought a monster made of angry witch-hunting jam last night.” It was a pivotal boss fight about half way through Don’t Nod’s ghost hunting action-adventureRPGBanishers: Ghosts Of New Eden, and typical of the over-the-top, slightly ridiculous, but entirely earnest drama of the game that joyfully pulls you along. Don’t Nod - who I am starting to suspect make theirmagic teen angsthologiesto fund their real passion for “grimdark grown-up fantasy that you sort of suspect should be a book series” - have followed up 2018’s third-person action effortVampyrwith this new semi-epic.
Banishers has a lot in common with the interwar bloodsucker, including methodical investigations and stacking moral choices, but is a much more accomplished effort. Banishers combines a sweeping, tragic love story with some very decent swashbuckling, shooting possessed skeletons in the face, and being disappointed at Puritans. A perfect game, some may say. I’d elevator-pitch it to you as a sort of goth Uncharted where you find-and-replace “treasure” with “ghosts”.
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The second goal is to deal with Antea at the end. You can help her Ascend to the afterlife, or resurrect her. Herein lie your moral choices, beloved of Don’t Nod. You carefully investigate each haunting case you find, listening to emotional echoes, summoning memories, or the more conventional method of rooting through paperwork. Once you’ve determined who the ghost is and why they’re haunting a local (often named something like Timerity and possessed of one of those silly hats with a belt on) you may either get rid of the ghost, or Blame the living person. The latter kills the person in question, and you have to Blame a majority of living people to ressurect Antea.
Map clearanceAs well as haunting cases, the map is littered with optional activites too: cursed chests, specter nests or elite ghost fights, and trips into the Void where you Banish ghosts. These give you skill point rewards or rare materials to upgrade your gear. Many of these secret areas are gated behind Antea’s increasing powers, which she can use to help with traversal or blast away different ghostly impediments.
The choice affects the stacking outcomes for New Eden, which is one of the more gratifying parts of Banishers. Around the town are smaller settlements that people fled to after the Nightmare took over: a hunters' camp in the forest finds itself suddenly expanded, a farming community likewise, and, likewise again, a fort and accompanying mine in the mountains. The more you help these places, the more stable and prosperous they become, and I enjoyed going back to the hunters' camp and see it turn into an actual village. But as is infinitely predictable with this sort of moral choice game, the most obvious rat-bastards will often be the most useful to a community - the odious racist is the hunter that supplies the fort with meat, that sort of thing - while those you could safely bad-murder without consequence are likely to be loving cottagecore lesbians.
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Focus Entertainment
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Focus Entertainment
As you get closer to the final resolution, you learn more about Red and Antea’s relationship. Their history, both together and separately in Scotland and Cuba, is referenced but never heavily exposited (even the lore of the game is light on exposition, for which I was grateful), and it seems they learn more about each other even as they grapple with the fact that one of them has died. The two excellent leads, Amaka Okafor and Russ Bain, ground the entire game, providing a very human anchor in those moments that would otherwise seem potentially a bit silly. You commit to the choice of what to do about Antea very early on, before you properly know either of them, and Red’s quiet but growing anguish made me wish I could change my mind. That’s probably the point, isn’t it? Maybe it’s because I’m having a week, but I cried at the end, and I have literally never cried at a video game before.
The annoyances, such as they are, will weigh heavy on some people, and the invitation to care earnestly, and to enjoy a story that is unironically about the power of love, will be anathema to others. But gosh, it’s a nice game - an oasis of solid single player story in a dry season of live service - and the biggest step forward in this particular direction that Don’t Nod have taken for years. I’m hoping the colon in the title might mean more banishings to come.
