Christian men. Englishmen. Mediocre, hateful men who’ll steal the world.
Antea Duarte
Table of Contents
Introduction
This game came out of nowhere for me. I had no idea it existed until I read a review of it in Rock Paper Shotgun by Alice Bell which convinced me to pick it up and give it a shot.
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”.
Alice Bell in Banishers: Ghosts Of New Eden review: an accomplished and emotional action adventure
That was enough to sell me on the game. I’ll start with what I enjoyed about the game and then talk about what I didn’t.
What I Liked
The strongest part of this game is what its done with its theme, narrative, and atmosphere. The haunted New England vibes are strong in this game and of course the vibes match the themes of haunting, trauma, violence, and injustice that are present in the narrative.
The Writing
There is strong writing here. Not every “haunting” case is equally good but most of them are. The main narrative revolving around our protagonists Ruadrigh mac Raith and Antea Duarte is one that weaves love, tragedy, and trauma together quite well. The voice actors for the protagonists have done a great job portraying their respective characters and I greatly enjoyed their work.
Themes
I wondered if a particularly thorny issue would be handled; namely racism, slavery, colonialism and the subjugation of the native peoples of the land.
The game avoids those topics in the main narrative however there is at least one haunting case where slavery is brought up, one dealing with racism, and one dealing with the subjugation of the indigenous people. The game does a reasonable job handling the topics in those cases. Personally, I find myself what a narrative in this setting that tackled those themes head on would look like.
What I Disliked
The biggest aspect of the game that I disliked is the repetitive combat. By the end of my 40 hours or so of game play I didn’t find myself really enjoying the combat. The combat system does evolve throughout the game especially to give Antea new abilities but its not enough to overcome the monotonous combat. The enemy variety in the game is not enough to keep things interesting either.
Speaking of combat: parrying in this game just doesn’t feel good. In fact I have not found a game other than Ghost of Tsushima where parrying feels satisfying. In 99% of combat encounters in this game, I just didn’t bother parrying and opted to keep dodging and attacking and it worked just fine. I played the game on the “Normal” difficulty.
I am also not a huge fan of the way fast travel works in this game, I found myself running to a fast travel point in the game so I could go somewhere quickly fairly often. This means that I was traversing a lot of ground I’ve seen before which is especially dull if I’ve cleared the area of the little collectibles that the game puts in every area.
From a narrative perspective, the game earns its run time. However, from a mechanical perspective it stretches itself too thin.
Conclusions
Overall, I think that this game is decent. It never particularly wowed me with its narrative beats or its mechanics but there was enough there for me to keep playing the game through to the end. If I did ratings, this would be a 6 or 7/10 game. It filled the March sized gap I had in my gaming “calendar” until the PC version of Horizon Forbidden West came out.
I don’t think the game was good enough to be in my GOTY list this year but it will get a honourable mention in the blog post. I am curious what else along this vein Don’t Nod is going to make. I would be interested in playing another game in this particular style from them.