Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden

Yet another video game took me to the New England region of North America, this time to the end of the 17th century. Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden is a third person action RPG from Don't Nod. The game is quite similar to the studio's 6 years older title Vampyr. The games are even set in the same universe, albeit the actual connections are almost nonexistent: one collectible note confirming the fact, one piece of gear called "Red Goddess" -- and maybe one of the protagonists saying once: "It's locked, alright", like Dr. Jonathan Reid in Vampyr stated every damn time upon encountering a locked door.

Banisher? I hardly know her

Antea Duarte and Ruaidhrigh "Red" mac Raith are the titular banishers, which is sort of like a witcher, a monster slayer for hire, except banishers are specialized in exterminating specters. Antea and Red have sailed across the Atlantic by the request of their old friend Charles Davenport to landfall in New Eden Town. Little do they know how unprepared they are: Charles turns out to have already met his end and Antea soon follows when the banisher duo encounters the town's unusually powerful tormentor specter, a nightmare.

Red barely survives getting dropped into the ocean and being taken by the tides south along the coast. A mysterious apprentice witch fishes him out and tends to him back to health. Antea soon returns to the Scotsman's side as a specter -- like the dead in New Eden very commonly do due to the worlds separating Hem being so thin in the area -- and together they begin the journey of getting back to the town and along the way figuring out the nightmare.

Starting from where things will end is a neat story element not all too often utilized in games. The prologue also quickly introduces you to the key people who are to blame for the curse. While Red was recovering from his near death experience, the townsfolk fled to three regions of the New Eden wilds where you'll meet them again while solving the case.

"Death to the dead. Life to the living."

In addition to deal with the nightmare, the banishers need to get back to New Eden Town for Antea's body, which is her key: an object that is needed to send a specter to the afterlife. Antea can't stay as a ghost because they leech life essence from the person they're haunting -- Red in this case -- eventually killing them. For the time being, Red's banisher profession allows them to postpone the leeching by banishing other specters and Antea consuming the essence from their keys.

Antea, who is (was) the master banisher of the duo, soon reveals that there is another way to resolve their problem: it is possible to resurrect her. That however requires collecting the essence of many still living people via a Blame ritual when solving their haunting case. You first have to decide if Antea and Red will attempt the resurrection or not, and later confirm the choice or change your mind. The second decision is final and if you act too much the opposite way from your oath, you will get no ending after defeating the nightmare and will instead be sent to the point after the prologue. That is unusual as well as funny -- and so not worth it. I read that there's some leeway with the chosen path but for each of the region leader figures, it is strict.

Vampyr's morality choice options made more sense: to kill civilians to gain power to get to the antagonist easier, or to avoid it as much as possible to avoid hurting the communities (and to stick to Reid's oath). Vampyr also has four more gradual endings, as I recall. In Banishers, the Ascension ending is the morally correct choice by a huge margin; you simply can't justify the Resurrection.

The resurrection suggestion comes so out of left field: you haven't gotten any impression that Red and Antea could've been capable of killing people for personal gain before. It's the complete opposite of their Banisher motto. The only reason for the protagonists to go for it would be crazy amount of sudden selfishness from Red, and Antea's specter-self's desire to not move on. The price for it is too high to pay. Antea returning to life would leave them so morally bankrupt that I doubt they could continue working as banishers, not to mention that someone would probably find out what they did. I saw only the Ascension ending, though, so I don't know how the other one pans out.

Delivering death only to the dead keeps a banisher's figurative mandate unchallenged. Nobody is hurt when a haunting case is solved by banishing the ghost. The whole truth that led to the haunting is figured out and the target may turn out to be a less-than-great person (like happens quite a few times) or even a potential threat to everyone else but it stays with the people involved. There seemed to be an unwritten professional confidentiality rule because Red doesn't ever snitch what wrongs the formerly haunted possibly committed. It's a bit unclear to whom he would even report, though, for there isn't exactly an established justice system in the colony. All the de-facto authority figures are compromised, too. In Cibola Burn of The Expanse novel series, it was observed that civilization doesn't simply follow people to a new place: it needs to be rebuilt there. And in New Eden that hasn't quite happened yet.

Quelle surprise

From the protagonists being a mixed race couple (and from Don't Nod's reputation) I could guess what kind of people encounters the game would consist of. And sure enough, there are at least four same sex relationships, women's rights issues, and slavery -- though all the featured slaves had already been bought free.

I had expected there to be wronged Native Americans as well but surprisingly the game featured merely one local (as Red put it). It's more of a past thing: many met, current and former soldiers are veterans of King Philip's War. I didn't recall ever having heard of it and for a good while I was unsure whom exactly the characters even meant when speaking of Indians -- until I eventually looked up the war. In the game, the Natives apparently avoid the New Eden region, calling it "Illmouth". I wonder if there was practicality in that decision by Don't Nod: I think featuring Native Americans in a game to be published in the U.S. requires some sort of approval committee and Don't Nod didn't want to add that to the development budget. Weird West, for instance, had one. Maybe it's just for games developed in the U.S., I don't know.

Solving the many, many haunting cases of Banishers does get repetitive due to it often being clear so quickly what happened and there not being any chance to fail them. However, there are also surprises there, for instance how you discover additional details to the main nightmare case in side quests. It's almost hilarious how a completely optional, out-of-quest dialogue with a certain individual reveals why the nightmare got as bad as it did. The specter would've no doubt appeared regardless, for the injustice she faced was so dire, but it was the person who caused it become a nightmare. The person meant well but I still think Red and Antea could've reprimanded them with a bit more drama.

In every haunting cause, instead of banishing the specter, you can choose to give them their Ascent, a more peaceful send-off. Both options are equal for the Ascension ending and seemingly otherwise as well. It may affect the disposition of the haunting's target afterwards but the ghost will leave with either option even if they had come off malignant before. They've been heard and it's enough. The banishers -- or at least Antea -- simply default to the Banish option. Antea is even about to banish Charles's specter in the prologue before Red protests and suggests the more pleasant option.

Later, upon learning about the Void and traveling through it, Red and Antea discover that there is another difference. Banished specters can be met as enemies in the Void. I don't know how much of an actual gameplay effect a banishment has: an extra encounter, a tougher encounter, or is it just fluff. But the least problematic way of dealing with ghosts clearly is just giving them their Ascent.

I'm not a fan of the Scottish accent but fortunately Red (Russ Bain) is quite mellow and his accent not that strong. It didn't grate me nearly as much as the characters in Still Wakes the Deep. The French developers seemed to love painting the Englishmen as baddies -- I wonder if that's why Red is a Scotsman. Also: what's up with the subtitles being aligned in the middle so weirdly? It's like there's an invisible portrait mode they're fitted into. That bothered me for quite a while until I eventually got used to it.

Where are we again?

While traveling in the New Eden wilderness, I noted the prominent bird ambience because one bird call sounded exceedingly familiar to me. I believe it's the call a great tit makes when agitated, a quick "chak-chak-chak-chak". The bird is a common visitor on bird feeders here and you tend to hear those sounds when you or something else suspicious is moving about. (That clip is great because it also has a magpie there at the end making a similar sound -- perhaps that's where the great tits learned it from.)

The problem with including that in this game is that the great tit doesn't generally occur in North America, or at least not when Banishers is set -- a small great tit population apparently lives in northern Midwest since the early 2000s. My suspicion about the bird ambience being out of place was proven correct by the credits where sound clips used listed a couple with the name 'Koli National Park'. That park is located in eastern Finland.

The game world of Banishers can be explored without loading screens but rather than a wide open world, it's a collection of winding paths with slightly more open areas every now and then, constantly broken by various obstacles that can't be traversed while in combat. The hiking is kind of a relaxing activity but if you do everything there is in the game, you'll be going back and forth so much that all leisurely fun is sucked out of it.

It doesn't help that the various ghosts and the corpses they possess keep coming back. And the combat in Banishers is not great -- it felt like a step back from Vampyr. In my opinion, they should've removed the respawns altogether. The game already has endlessly repeatable ritual sites and void breaches if you want to farm experience and materials for gear upgrades.

Unenjoyable combat

Red fights using a sword and a torch with a fancy lighting mechanism. There's a light and heavy attack -- and them being on separate buttons immediately told me that Don't Nod hadn't gotten any better with mouse & keyboard control schemes. The correct way is to have a modifier key like Shift to alter which attack goes off. Block/parry is on C by default and I switched it to Q like I've gotten used it being in AC Odyssey and Valhalla. I actually ended up buying those games at the start of this year (after having beaten them on Ubisoft+) and I've been replaying/farming their respective free currencies to buy the weekly MTX item offerings. And I have to say that Banishers' combat compares terribly to them both.

The combat in this game feels unresponsive. Dodge doesn't go off quickly enough and timing your block correctly for a parry is difficult. Camera is way too close and enemies keep sneaking to your side unseen. You have a banish gauge that can be used for supposedly high damage attack once full. But if you don't pick gear pieces and perks for it, it will remain unimpressive.

Red's melee attacks also charge a spirit bar. While that bar has charge, you can switch to Antea. She fights by punching with her spectral fists -- which is definitely not the style I would've picked. Like, what the hell?

Later Red also gets a rifle, which is not the slowest ever to reload despite being a muzzleloader. I don't know if the pump-action-shotgun-like racking motion he does at the end of the reload animation would actually work with a real-life muzzleloader. The rifle also has infinite ammunition and is pinpoint accurate. Because RMB was taken by heavy attack, they put rifle aim on Ctrl -- another unusual choice. I kept it on default, though, because I didn't know where I'd put the heavy attack for it to make sense. Shift modifier would've made things so much simpler.

I decided that I should focus on the rifle to avoid the melee combat as much as possible. One type of specter dodges rifle shots and kept causing me trouble but eventually Antea gets an Ensnare ability that allows you to trap the specter in place for an easy weakpoint shot. The endless ritual sites and void breaches have modifiers that enhance the damage of certain type attacks at a time. That also means attack types not mentioned do jack shit. The modifier that boosts riposte and running attack damage always caused fights to last for a good while with my rifle specialization.

Coming straight from the smoothest running Unreal Engine 4 title ever (The Pathless), Banishers' heavy stutter struggle even on minimum settings was quite the whiplash. It could've been initial runtime shader compilation causing it but running the game in exclusive fullscreen removed the stutters almost completely.

One haunting case in Banishers, as well as Antea's backstory, involve demonic possession the banishers don't quite understand. That made me think that maybe Don't Nod wants to do an exorcist kind of action RPG in the future. We'll see.

Don't Nod's latest game, Aphelion, came out two weeks ago, Game Pass included. Aphelion being a scifi walking simulator of sorts had gotten me interested and I was going to play it right after this one. However, the game turned out to be somehow extremely repulsive and I immediately uninstalled it. The game began in the exact same way as Banishers, with a mixed race couple having some manner of pillow talk, albeit way more awkward and vague to the max. Don't Nod had also decided that zooming right into the faces of the characters was a thing they should be doing.

Looking at user reviews, skipping the game was probably the correct choice: there not being any payoff for beating it. I guess Aphelion is just government-funded drivel (via the European Space Agency).