According to the Banishers handbook featured in DON’T NOD’s latest, Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden, the goal of ghost-hunting is to be “Efficient. Adaptive. Versatile.” That skillset is what’s made Antea Duarte and her apprentice (and lover) Red mac Raith so renowned, so much so that they’ve been summoned to the fictional town of New Eden, located not far from Boston in the Puritan territories of Massachusetts, to break a powerful spirit’s curse. These two characters are vividly rendered, and their loss is heartbreakingly portrayed, but Ghosts of New Eden itself only partly lives up to their guiding principles.
The story, set in 1695, is indeed efficient, with believable, tragic characters and hauntings that will have you grappling with a morality that’s far from cut and dry, but the way in which Red and Antea go about investigating ghostly occurrences involves a lot of tedious trudging back and forth across overly large forests, swamps, caves, farmsteads, and garrisons.
As for the gameplay, it’s certainly adaptive, allowing players to swap at will between the two Banishers, in order to solve environmental puzzles and penetrate the defenses of their spectral foes, but it’s also repetitive and shallow outside of a handful of main quests that introduce one-off effects. And while there’s a rich and wide variety to the game’s setting, from wintery Mount Pleasant to the arable fields of the Harrows, each of which is teeming with collectibles, the rewards for doing so feel unsatisfying given what’s already available along the main path.
After an intentionally misleading prologue, Antea is murdered by a nightmare—the most dangerous of ghosts, specters, and scourges—and she finds herself anchored to Red. Now the two must find a way to travel back to New Eden in order to retrieve her body, so that Red can make the difficult choice to either Ascend her spirit or, turning his back on their oath (“Life to the living and death to the dead”), Resurrect her. Each of the game’s many Haunting side quests across their journey are designed as challenges to the rigid morality of that oath for the way they put you face to face with everything from racist to sexist hauntees, and it’s deeply satisfying to make the final call on whether to punish the ghost’s target or to release the ghost.
There are some great highs to Ghosts of New Eden, like a descent through a mine in which the quarantined had been left to rot. The storytelling alone merits a playthrough for anyone remotely interested in the gothic or ghostly. But too much of the game feels as stuck as the ghosts to which Red and Antea minister. The investigations in particular lack any real deductive elements: Players follow map markers from point to point, with the game automatically providing conclusions. Combat is similarly oversimplified, never offering up enough of a challenge or variety to really spring to life. It’s a credit to DON’T NOD’s worldbuilding that simply following quest markers and soaking in the texts discovered in each location feels satisfying, but it’s a hollow victory that leaves you hungry for something more to do.
Ghosts of New Eden is most similar in design to DON’T NOD’s 2018 game Vampyr, in which you also had to choose whether to save or sacrifice members of a community. The key difference is that the choices you make in Vampyr have significant consequences. If you didn’t feed, you’d be perpetually under-leveled and the game would be harder. In Banishers, the worst outcome of a selfish decision seems to be that you might fall out of favor with a shopkeeper who’d now charge you more, or that you might not see certain redemptive sidequests.
There’s not a single choice that you make here—including whether to Ascend or Resurrect Antea, considering that she keeps asking you to do the former—that feels difficult. If there are consequences, such as being attacked in the Void by those you’ve Banished, the laughable ease of combat makes them feel equivalent to a peashooter revenging itself upon a tank.
Though the length of Ghosts of New Eden’s campaign is useful in establishing the intimate relationship between Red and Antea, it makes the rest of the game feel padded, especially if you’re doing the enjoyable, story-rich sidequests. There just aren’t enough enemy types or Manifestation skills to keep combat feeling fresh, and what you learn within the game’s first 10 hours is more or less what you’ll be doing for the subsequent 20 to 30.
The rare exceptions are in the act-ending dungeons, each of which finds unique ways (in environment and combat) to represent the massive, powerful spirits that you’ll have to contend with, from navigating the wreckage left behind by a Beast, to seeking out the weak links along the massive chain winding throughout a mine turned prison, to separating the goo-like creatures spreading along the bottom of a poisoned water well. These are rich instances of the monsters informing the world-building itself, as opposed to what more regularly happens elsewhere, which is recycling combat to fill the empty spaces of New Eden’s big regions.
This game was reviewed with code provided by Sandbox Strategies.
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