Why You Liked … Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden

Most games provide agency, which players mistake for narrative. But every so often, a game comes along that balances both, using interactivity to enhance a meaningful narrative. Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden is one of those rare gems that provides a story worth dying for.

We’re saturated with open-world RPGs that mistake busywork for storytelling. Every so often, a game arrives that reminds us: a story isn’t about what you can do; it’s about why you do it. Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden is one such game where every choice and interaction carries meaning, making the journey as powerful as the destination.

See, there’s a kind of formula many games follow. There’s a main story, but because that’s often fairly simple—say, kill the Witch King of this land and free the people—there’s an element of padding. This is in the form of side quests or go-dos, where you need to power up, collect your homies, or whatever else is required to kill said Witch King.

We’re used to this; most of us don’t even bat an eye. But every so often, we get a game where the side quests are the story. The levelling up is the reason for the whole affair. And every person you meet—from the kill-ten-rats guy in Act One through to the I-killed-my-wife guy in Act Three—contributes to the narrative. It’s all had purpose and meaning that transcends the activities and into the story space itself.

A few games have successfully pulled off this prestige. Planescape: Torment did it famously back in 1999. BioShock delivered a they-really-did-that moment in 2007. And in the year of our Lord 2024, Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden pulled the same trick.

Narrative Masterpiece

Our plot follows Rory and Antea. These are two people very much in love and bound together by a common purpose. They’re Banishers, a profession that promises life to the living and death to the dead. Their job is to uncover the reason behind hauntings, put the dead to rest, and liberate the living. It’s a calling that’s part spirituality, part true detective, and all badass. Despite the evenness of their relationship, Rory is the Padawan to Antea’s Jedi Knight. He’s a scrub, a noob, a soldier who fought in another man’s war and has come to the new country to find a better purpose.

The challenge is that, despite their teamwork and badassery, Antea gets merc’d right at the start. This is not a spoiler; it’s in all the trailers and is the core conceit of the game. Much like God of War, which blends excellent action combat from Kratos with a side-order of cool skills from Atreus, Banishers binds Antea’s ghost to Rory’s adventures. Rory must level his shit up and do it fast to uncover the terrible wrong that’s led a Nightmare to curse the lands around New Eden town. This isn’t just a story about ghosts and monsters; it’s about the lengths we go to for love, even when that love exists only as a memory tethered to the living world.

That by itself is worth the cost of entry, but what much discourse on the game misses out on is that it’s all connected. Every person you meet has something to do with the horrible birth of the monster that plagues these lands. It’s not that they’re all to blame; some were bystanders, others tried to help, but many raised a torch to help burn the witch they thought lived among them.

Each of these characters is beautifully crafted. We recognise the militia captain and his loss. We empathise with the free man, once a slave, and all he had to do to get to where he is. The Native American woman who lost her tribe is a poignant moment of loss alongside the town she lives in, where everyone’s trying to build a new life. The mayor and his inquisitive son demand we justify to what lengths we’d go to protect those we love, and how we might balance that against others under our care. We grok their motives. Even when they fall, or when we abhor their actions, we understand them. They are seen and heard.

For example, one side quest involves a widower who’s in denial. As you investigate, it becomes clear all is not what it seems. There might be a ghost or demon to blame, but the real culprit is human guilt made manifest. It’s a subtle reminder that not all monsters wear claws and fangs.

The witch-burning at the heart of New Eden echoes chilling historical moments like the Salem witch trials. Banishers masterfully examines how fear and desperation shape moral failings. It’s less a condemnation of the people and more a mirror to our own vulnerability under pressure. It’s through these simple people living a very human existence that we begin to understand the Nightmare monster living in the eye of the hurricane. The monster is, after all, a metaphor for our human failings. The witch-burning at the heart of New Eden isn’t just a reflection of past injustices; it’s a cautionary tale for our times, when fear and desperation still shape moral failings, whether online or in real life.

But it’s also a signpost for our human virtues. The game asks you early on whether you’d like to let Antea Ascend into the afterlife or bring her back to life. The consequences of Ascension are that Rory will never see or speak to her again, and this is a man very much in love, even though his love’s body is dead and cold. The alternative is to be the wrathful hand of judgement, condemning and sacrificing the people who birthed the Nightmare, allowing Antea another chance at life.

It’s a powerful choice. Knowing what we know of all the wrongs that come from a simple action, would we do something horrendous, perhaps justifying it against the tableau of a new beginning? Would we become the people around us, taking part in their crimes, to undo the wrong? And what would be the consequence of that?

Or do we allow our wife to die fully, finally, and forever? It’s a choice that lets us understand whether we could do things that make us hated, or make the ultimate sacrifice where we might just end up hating ourselves.

Game as Art

Making a game is a lot more complicated than just penning a story. I remember an interview with Swen Vinke, head of Larian, on the studio’s hit Baldur’s Gate III. The interviewer asked something like, “My dude, was it the actors who made the game sing?” and he answered, “Well, it’s everyone. It’s the actors, the writers, the animators, the programmers, and designers collaborating that make the experience.”

The core gameplay loop revolves around Witchering across the surrounds of New Eden, helping people out with their ghost (and other) problems. But to Swen’s point, Banishers highlights just how artistic and collaborative the design had to be to deliver such a success. The writing of each moment is on point, but without kick-ass action and brilliant acting, it wouldn’t come to life. Russ Bain’s Rory gives us a man torn between duty and love, while Amaka Okafor’s Antea blends strength and vulnerability in a way that makes her ghostly presence feel more alive than most flesh-and-blood NPCs. Their performances don’t just sell the story; they elevate it, giving weight to every choice and moment. Rory and Antea aren’t just characters; they’re the emotional core of a game that challenges us with a simple question: what would you sacrifice for those you love?

It’s this humanity amidst the supernatural that makes their performances unforgettable. While Bain and Okafor deliver career-defining performances as Rory and Antea, the side plots and their actors are also wonderful. Sure, Russ and Amaka were brilliant, but that’s like saying chocolate cake is better than ginger slice. It’s all cake, and it’s all good.

This leads into the haunting beauty of New Eden. The environs complement the story. Everywhere you look, the savage, untamed nature of the land looks back. The wilderness is more than a backdrop. It’s a reflection of the internal battles Rory faces and a constant reminder that survival often comes at a cost. You see villagers and hunters trying to wrestle a life from the wilds, and the wilds are wrestling back. The frontier shapes its people, and through the moulding of their clay, we begin to understand how they might be driven to make the decisions they made. It doesn’t make what happened right, but when everything is hard, you always look for simple solutions.

It’s a powerful metaphor for our time, where we’re seeking answers to complicated problems, often falling back on fascism and other forms of blaming the other. We might come from an enlightened time, but knowing Shakespeare doesn’t change the feral creature inside you that just wants to live. Seeing ourselves through a 1600s lens is a haunting reminder that we’re all made of the same meat, and the choices we make have longer-lasting impacts than we might think.

Exploring these themes tackles the existential questions in ways movies or books couldn’t. We can read about how Nazis are bad, but living alongside them makes it real. If The Witcher 3 gave us morally complex quests, and Red Dead Redemption 2 captured the startling beauty of a land in transition, Banishers blends both into a world where every interaction carries weight.

Skill Issue

I’ve touched on the gameplay loop, but it’s worth calling it out again. I’d say it’s a flawed but forgivable reproduction of God of War’s combat sandbox. When the game starts, everything is more or less as it seems; you’ll get to fight spirits and wolves in your cruise across the wild frontier.

Things get a little rougher as the enemy types vary and their density increases. There are crowd control issues and bullet-sponge mobs which, when coupled with the sub-optimal system to let you know where attacks are coming from, mean this game becomes fairly unforgiving on higher difficulties. I will own my fair share of controller-breaking rage moments when a spirit teleported right up the crack of my ass while I was dodging ranged attacks. But these moments serve as a reminder: mastery here is earned, not given. The satisfaction of besting these encounters makes the triumphs all the sweeter. It’s no soulslike with its difficulty, but it demands precision and awareness.

Despite the quirks, the seamless integration of gameplay and story makes its mark. Side quests draw you through a land that begs to be explored. Much like Demon’s Souls, you’ll unlock ways to traverse, shortcuts, and map curios that bring the world to life and make exploration more than just corner-checking. 

It’s possible some players might feel disconnected between the story’s emotional depth and its more gamey combat elements. You’re here for the Investigations, the story, and the world, and if those don’t gel with you it might be a rougher ride.

Agency as Power

The first real moment where I realised the power of sparing or condemning was pretty early on. You find this dude in the woods, he’s a bit touched by the angels, and you get to decide if his soul is one you’d like to contribute to Antea’s possible resurrection, or if he’s just a mentally ill person who needs a little more understanding than the time period would normally allow.

The choice is completely up to you; the game provides no overly Western moralising of which way you should go. Both options lead to an ending; much like the sun rising every day, the credits will roll on this game regardless of your choices. How you feel when they roll is the real question.

It’s this aspect of sparing murders and ascending ghosts that were assholes that make for the game’s most harrowing moments. I don’t fear being the strong arm of justice, but I can’t bear the consequences of harvesting souls to bring Antea back. But this choice, this unwillingness to sacrifice the weak, lingered long after the screen faded to black. It was a reminder of how much the game had drawn me into its moral web.

Banishers allows you to explore components of yourself. Are you a good or bad person? Do you think justice and mercy are attributes of righteousness and evil? If no one’s watching—if no one would ever know—what choices might you make? These moments aren’t just good storytelling. They’re a litmus test for our values. As our real world constantly asks us to weigh personal comfort against collective good, Banishers feels profoundly timely.

The beauty of Banishers lies in how it uses player agency not to empower, but to confront. Each decision is a reckoning, a chance to ask not just what kind of person Rory should be, but what kind of person we are, and what we value most. While the game provides nice moments of self-reflection, there are broader implications of these decisions. Banishers made me question not just what I’d do, but what kind of person I wanted Rory to be. And perhaps, by association, how I might want to live my life after I put the controller down.

PCMR FTW

It’s worth touching on how adeptly the game takes advantage of modern hardware. I played this start to finish on a Ryzen 7700X with an NVIDIA 4070 Super and 32GB of RAM. With all the sliders set to maximum, it cruised along comfortably around the 80fps mark. Crucially, there wasn’t traversal or shader stutter.

The sound stage is idyllic, with both ambient sounds and music serving to enrich the story without overplaying their hand. Positional audio worked well for me and was clear at all times. There wasn’t any muddy dialogue. There is excellence in the tiny details; the facets of people’s lives like the possessions they valued, or the moral compass they navigate with, are all signposts that made me feel like I was living in the 1600s.

The crisp textures, the sublime lighting, and the environmental details are all artistry that reinforce the game’s emotional tone. New Eden doesn’t just look or sound real. It feels alive, haunted by the choices of its people. This isn’t just a game you play; it’s a place you inhabit.

Bittersweet Perfection

The strength of Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden lies in its ability to tell a meaningful story while leveraging the videogame medium. While combat mechanics don’t reach the lofty heights of some of action gaming’s greats, they absolutely get the job done and don’t detract from what’s ultimately a once-in-a-generation experience.

Banishers is a testament to the power of storytelling in the face of a gaming industry often more focused on monetisation than meaning. It’s a love letter to those who value stories about love and the courage to let go. More than that, it’s a reminder that our greatest battles aren’t fought with swords or spells, but in the quiet moments when we must decide who we are and who we’re willing to become. It’s a meditation on what it means to be human. This is an experience worthy of those who’ve lost, or who fear losing. It’s a reminder of why we fight for what we hold dear, and why sometimes, we have to let go.