Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden Review

Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden may look like a bit of a surprise to all those gamers who know French developer Don’t Nod mostly from pure adventure games like their breakout Life is Strange and sequel, Tell Me Why, Twin Mirror, Harmony: The Fall of Reverie, or even the recent Jusant.

However, the studio has carefully cultivated an equally interesting strand of action games since its very foundation. Indeed, their debut game was an action/adventure title called Remember Me made for publisher CAPCOM. Even that title had a lot of interesting elements, despite failing on a number of key points which meant it was less successful than it could have been.

Don’t Nod did not despair and tried again with Vampyr, a 2018 action RPG made for Focus Home Entertainment. The premise was incredibly interesting: set in London during the Spanish flu, it followed hematologist Dr. Reid after he was transformed into a vampire. Players had to make the difficult choice of sticking to the character’s Hippocratic Oath or feeding on humans to augment the vampire’s abilities and strength, deciding the fates of various NPCs one by one, ultimately leading to a specific ending. While the game still had its faults (mainly the combat system), it managed to sell a million units in about a year, convincing publisher Focus Home to renew the partnership with Don’t Nod on the genre.

I was honestly expecting a direct sequel, but the developers decided to go in another direction and make Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden, which is an entirely different franchise. Still, Vampyr’s roots are immediately clear from the get-go: not only is this another action RPG, but once again, the premise of the story is incredibly exciting. Here, players step into the shoes of a couple of ghost hunters from the late 17th century: Antea Duarte, a Cuban master Banisher, and her apprentice Red mac Raith, a fiery Scotsman.

The two are called to New Eden, a small community of settlers not too far from Boston, by a priest friend and fellow Banisher, Charles Davenport. New Eden is plagued by a major haunting, he wrote in a letter asking for their help. Antea and Red eventually get there when the situation is already dire and are not fully prepared to deal with their enemy, leading to their defeat and, most importantly, to Antea’s death (which is not a spoiler, by the way, as the whole pre-release material already made that very clear). She does not pass away, though, but instead lingers on as a spirit at Red’s side. On one hand, she has become the very thing she hates. On the other hand, she is unable to let go and wishes to protect Red at all costs.

That’s when players are first faced with the game’s big choice. Antea and Red can either agree to let her Ascend to the beyond by banishing or aiding the ascent of other spirits in New Eden, or go on a quest to resurrect her through the dangerous and forbidden ritual of Lesser Palingenesis. The latter requires sacrificing (Blaming, as it is called in Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden) a large amount of settlers, which goes against everything they believe in.

The thing is, Antea and Red are incredibly in love. They are fully committed to each other in a way rarely seen in games featuring a duo of protagonists. To that end, the dubious choice of changing the release date to move away from big releases (the beginning of the year has already seen several multi-million sellers and others are coming later this month) is at least thematically very fitting since the game is now launching on Valentine’s Day.

As such, I decided to pick the latter, albeit more difficult, choice: resurrecting Antea. Mind you, at this point in the game, it’s a mere agreement between the two, and it can be changed later on. It’s also far from guaranteed to succeed, as you will have to ensure you have gathered enough spirit essence to perform your chosen ritual.

This is by no means an easy feat, given the complexity of the various stories you’ll encounter. While there are a few clear-cut cases, most of the time there will be gray areas where you might feel conflicted about what to do, which is certainly a testament to good writing. Also, I should add that it is entirely possible to fail because the game never tells you if you’re on the right track when it comes to the spirit essence. It would have perhaps been helpful if Antea made some comments every now and then on the topic. As it is right now, chances are some players will find out they’ve failed once they get to the ending. I know something about that.

Anyway, you’ll gather essence mostly by completing Haunting Cases, the main side activity in Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden. This is also used (regardless of whether you Blame or Banish or Ascend the spirit) to power up Antea in the character progression skill tree, whereas Red’s skills come from leveling up with experience points. There are five skill trees, each tied to one of Antea’s supernatural abilities as a ghost: Unveil, Leap, Outburst, Ensnare, and Fusion. These also get progressively larger; the Unveil tree only has eight abilities to choose from, whereas the Fusion tree has 40. Moreover, the game always lets you pick one of two abilities from each node, excluding the other.

Overall, the developers were right when they claimed there’s a lot of build variety. In combination with the equipment found throughout the game, a player could specialize Antea and Red to be very different Banishers from the versions played by a fellow friend. On this aspect, Don’t Nod might have even surpassed Sony Santa Monica’s God of War, a clear and explicit inspiration for the game.

Of course, all the great character progression in the world would mean little if the combat itself didn’t feel good. Thankfully, the developers took to heart the feedback they got from Vampyr’s clunky combat. While not as awesome as God of War’s, it is far smoother than any of their previous games. It’s satisfying to play, and when played on higher difficulties, it can also be fairly challenging, especially during some of the Nest or Elite encounters. These are specific places where Antea and Red have to eradicate a specter nest. Here, Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden likes to throw oddballs at the players by tweaking the parameters. For example, these ghosts might take more damage when Red is at full health but less damage when he’s not, or they might be more vulnerable to rifle shots but less to melee, et cetera.

Unlike God of War, where players can usually only ask Atreus to perform a couple of specific actions, Antea and Red are almost always seamlessly switchable between each other as long as there are enough Spirit Points in her bar. Antea has awesome ghost powers such as Leap and an area-of-effect Outburst attack. Moreover, when you’re controlling her, Red isn’t taking damage, which is great.

I do have to admit that compared not only to God of War but to the great action RPGs in general, Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden suffers a bit from scarce enemy variety. There are various types of ghosts, granted, but perhaps not enough. You’ll occasionally find animals to fight, but there are only wolves in New Eden, apparently. Bears or even Mountain Leopards could have been nice additions, for example.

The comparison to God of War certainly extends to the level design. Much like Sony Santa Monica’s masterpiece, this game also employs a freely explorable semi open world gated by progress. Sometimes you’ll have to come back to a zone once you get the associated power to go through. Moreover, Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden features many environmental puzzles that definitely reminded me of God of War. I mean that in a good way, as both games feature puzzles that are just interesting enough to make the player think about the solution while avoiding any excessive frustration.

By the way, Banishers is far larger than the developers had let on. They said they expected 20 to 30 hours of playthrough, but Steam says I’ve played 57 hours and that’s with a couple of question marks (not to mention the collectibles) left on the map. There’s a lot of content that will keep players busy for a long time, especially if they also complete Activities, which are little stories that often follow up on the choices made during Haunting Cases. If you’ve concluded a case in a way that does not satisfy a fellow ghost, chances are they might come back angrier than ever.

Even from a technical standpoint, the game is Don’t Nod’s highest point yet. It’s made with Unreal Engine 5, although it does not use its signature features, Lumen and Nanite. However, it can still look great on PC with maxed settings. Granted, there’s no dynamic night and day cycle, which probably means the lighting is baked. There’s little to complain, though, when the result looks as good as this. Most importantly, the performance is one of the best I’ve experienced recently in an Unreal Engine title due to the minimal stuttering encountered in my playthrough. I was hopeful that would be the case after my interview with the developers, who were very aware of the long-standing traditions of terrible UE game releases on PC.

I must say I was a bit puzzled by the ending I got, but I will reserve judgment on that until I’ve learned a bit more about how the endings work and what the others are. Still, I must end by praising the performance of voice actors Amaka Okafor (recently seen in Netflix’s Bodies) and Russ Bain, who definitely contributed to making Antea and Red such a remarkable couple.

Reviewed on PC (code provided by the publisher).

Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden

Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden

There’s little doubt Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden is Don’t Nod’s finest action game yet. I would also venture to say it’s one of their best games, period, and it’s also a great action RPG in its own right thanks to enjoyable combat, a big world with lots of content to explore and interesting stories to experience, and particularly for the amazing couple of lover protagonists.

Buy for $59.99 from Amazon

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