French studio DON’T NOD, best known for the Life is Strange franchise, uses its narrative adventure techniques combined with surprisingly good combat to elevate this haunting Action-RPG to a higher level than it could achieve in other hands. Interesting stories, fantastic acting performances, a vast open world with plenty of secrets, and enjoyable combat make for an excellent experience.
The story begins in 1695, with our main characters, Red Mac Reid and Antea Duarte, on a ship bound for the New World (Colonial America) at the behest of an old friend. Red and Antea are lovers and partners, members of a sect known as the Banishers, working together to protect the living from the dead. Their job is to deal with ghosts, specters, and other post-life nuisances who, instead of moving on to the afterlife, linger around to make things difficult for those they left behind.
Upon arriving in America in the town of New Eden, the pair discovers their friend has died, and New Eden itself is in dire straits. The city seems to be under the curse of unknown origin, causing intense suffering and horrifying dreams to its inhabitants. Red and Antea set out to solve the mystery and soon find themselves against the Big Bad, a creepy girl known only as the “Nightmare.” In battle, Antea is killed, and Red is nearly drowned, but at the last moment, he is saved by a witch who implores him to continue the quest and free the land from the Nightmare’s wrath. Red soon discovers that Antea is still with him, albeit in a slightly different form.
These events set the central story and game mechanics, where Red inhabits the physical world, and Antea, the spirit world. They work in tandem to free the city from collective nightmares, relieving the haunted settlers of their various ghosts and deciding how to deal with Antea’s premature departure.
Despite all the hauntings, eerie fog, and nasty creatures roaming around, New Eden and the surrounding lands are beautifully crafted. Although it represents only a small corner of the American Northeast, DON’T NOD managed to create a good amount of diversity in the areas you’ll visit. While you’ll spend a lot of time wandering through pine forests, you’ll also end up on the beach, in the mountains, in a vast underground mine, and even in an underground world. The game works well with verticality, providing some spectacular views.
Navigation is a bit mixed and led to one of the few less shining (I can’t even call it negative) aspects I found in the whole experience. On the positive side, the game map is excellent with clearly marked points of interest and mission indicators. When you come across an item or area that requires a power you don’t have yet, the map even records their locations along with the skill needed, a small touch that makes a big difference when cleaning up things in the endgame and something sorely missed in most open-world games. The compass at the top of the HUD shows the mission marker as usual, but it can be quite confusing to follow it correctly when you can’t go straight to the goal due to impassable terrain often found between you and where you want to go.
With the stage set, what do you actually do in this recreation of early colonial America? As it turns out, quite a bit. You mostly follow the story, helping the settlers of New Eden rid themselves of the curse that plagues them. You do this by talking to various involved parties with a range of questions and responses that affect how the conversation flows and how settlers react to you. You’ll use gathered information to investigate clues and use them to find ghosts, leading to discoveries about what drives their haunting. You’ll perform various rituals to see events from the past, compel certain spirits to manifest so you can question them, and occasionally force a truly nasty type of spirit known as the Whip to appear in the physical world. There’s also some light puzzle-solving during investigations, like pushing mine carts and the like, but it shouldn’t pose too much trouble for those who’ve played these types of games before.
True to the developer’s narrative roots, choice-based gameplay, you’ll encounter many points in the story where you must decide how to deal with various people, living or dead, you come across in your journey. Will you blame or spare the living, banish or uplift the ghosts? All of this plays into the central story between Red and Antea, and it all works very well. There’s also a healthy amount of haunting cases outside the main story’s golden path, and these are well worth the time to experience as the action scenes and story bits rival the high quality of the main story.
Banishers also features a good-sized open-world map for players to explore, with treasures to find, dark magical objects to cleanse, collectible items to grab, and much more. There’s no crafting in the game, but various plants, items, and spectral remains you pick up will fuel different rituals you must perform and provide upgrades for your equipment. You can also buy materials, items, and weapons from several characters scattered around the world, but I found I didn’t have to do that even once since everything you need can be found in abundance during gameplay.
Since Antea is a spirit, she can see the spiritual side of the world, able to find traces of spectral energy that Red can’t discern. In battle, this means she deals more damage to ghosts you fight but only has melee attacks since she can’t handle physical weapons. In the early game, Red’s attacks are entirely sword and fireball-based with standard light and heavy attacks, a blocking ability along with effective timed parrying, and dodging that is excellent and enhances the combat loop. I didn’t find much need for blocking as going on the offensive generally proved an effective strategy along with well-timed dodging, but I assume it would be quite useful on the two harder difficulty levels (there are a total of 5, ranging from Story to Very Hard).
A little further into the story, you’ll get your first gun, a musket fitting the game’s setting. That’s when combat really opens up and flourishes, allowing you to combine ranged and melee attacks into some very satisfying combos. Some enemies can be taken out with a single shot from the gun, while others may be staggered, giving you a chance to sprint towards them and jump into a devastating heavy attack. The combat reminds me of the God of War games, which is an absolute compliment, giving players everything they need to feel powerful and capable without unnecessarily complicating things.
There’s not a huge variety of enemies to face out there in the woods, mostly several types of ghosts and plenty of wolves. That doesn’t, however, make the combat any less engaging, as enemies scale with your weapon and skill improvements and keep the challenge up all the time. Boss battles are truly a treat, not so much because their mechanics differ from regular combat but because of their design and impact on the story and pain that brought them to that point.
As you progress through the game, you’ll gain XP and level up your character, unlocking skill trees focusing on Antea’s various abilities, referred to here as “Manifestations.” Skill points gained by leveling up can be used for various skills and stat improvements for both Red and Antea, and there are plenty of choices and directions to go with. There’s nothing groundbreaking here, but it’s a pretty robust set of skills that will give you more than enough combinations.
There’s also an excellent set of equipment that serves both protagonists, spanning weapons and passive items like rings and brooches. Each equipment category has twelve slots available, and each item can also be upgraded seven times with various collectibles you pick up, rewarding stats with each improvement (though it’s unclear what many stats, such as Wrath or Tenacity, contribute to the characters). It might be relatively basic and somewhat linear, but it’s perfectly applied to give players a action-packed experience that still harkens back to the RPG genre.
Now, let’s get back to the story, which is still the best part of this game. In many ways, the game reminds me of The Last of Us, where a significant part of the bond you form with the protagonists happens in quiet moments as you walk from place to place. Red and Antea feel like a real couple: they reminisce, they’re sarcastic, they argue, and then they apologize. Learning their backstories amid narrative twists only makes you more attached to them. Much of their dialogue sounded just like how real relationships are without references to ghost banishment, of course. The writing is fantastic, and the voice acting performances are out of this world. They become these characters and breathe life into them, making every emotional scene and quiet moment between them equally impactful. You believe that the love these two feel for each other is real, and you can feel their struggle to express how they feel about each other as their journey becomes increasingly perilous.
Banishers is a beautiful game, and while it’s not on the level of today’s Unreal Engine 5 games, it doesn’t need to be to achieve the visual storytelling that goes along with top-notch voice acting in the game. The faces are very detailed and reflect the emotions of their performances. The game world is genuinely gorgeous, especially the panoramic shots showcasing the expanse of untamed wilderness and its natural beauty, with the kind of verticality I love in an open-world game. The only time the visual representations encounter issues is with lighting, which can sometimes be a bit dark, and some occasional clipping when player models get too close to the environment, especially in tight spaces.
