So I've been playing Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden, and man, so many little moments scream "we needed to put a little more time into making this".
Now, I'm playing it across PC and a Series S, so I've seen both how amazing it can look (PC at max settings was default, surprisingly) and the visuals truly are great. But the game has two HUGE issues: the blatant use of "pre-made Unreal Engine assets", and some serious internal logic issues.
To the first issue: there's some objects in the game that scream "we used library assets as a placeholder and then the game was released before we fixed them".
The wispy spirit balls, for instance, that I assume are supposed to evoke "lost souls". It's very Fable, in that these wisps will inhabit something to animate it. The issue is, well, it's the same wisp for everything. The curse placed on a cursed chest? Wisp. The souls hanging around near a spectre gate? Yep, ditto. And the "soul grabber cages", and sometimes just for effect.
Then there's the shotgun musket. I can't not call it that, because I've watched that animation too many times. The reload on the in-game rifle, which is supposed to be a 17th century musket, is... well, it starts well. He pours something down the barrel, i.e. flash powder and a musket ball assumedly. But then, for some reason, he cocks it like a pump-action shotgun. A very "generic animation" motion. And it just... breaks all immersion.
I'd have posted a video but, well, going through a whole Let's Play video online to find a 3 second animation is a level of dedicated I do not wish to be.
The second issue is much, much worse.
Look, we're in a world where Ghost Really Happen, like confirmed they are a thing, to the point where there are several dedicated groups of people who deal with such things that includes the titular Banishers. So, uh... why are you just leaving rotting bodies everywhere? Like I get it, these people died in unknown circumstances and are lost souls as a result. But, for fuck's sake, part of the arsenal of a Banisher is a fucking flaming torch. BURN THE DAMN BODIES. Especially as there's a whole "that spectre's attempting to possess that body" mechanic.
Also on the subject of fire and burning, when you find a bonfire in-game (save point, upgrade point and fast travel spot all in one) you light it with a flint and steel. My guy, YOUR WEAPONS ARE A SWORD AND TORCH. THE TORCH IS SELF IGNITING. So why on God's green earth are you placing moss and striking a flint and steel? Your solution is literally already in your hands!
But the worst crime is very simple: in a world of demonology and banishing spirits and whatnot, there are (supremely Pagan looking) "ghost wards" that actually work. Well, I say "they work" - they work AGAINST THE PLAYER. There are literally areas where your former lover/partner/senior banisher ghost says "until you destroy these wards I can't manifest". But guess who can? Yep, literally EVERY OTHER GHOST IN THE GAME. They can even possess corpses under these wards. It makes literally zero sense.
And said wards, at one point in the game, are placed IN THE REALM OF THE DEAD. Which... what? EVERYTHING in that realm is a spirit, including the living! Their very presence would collapse it. This makes zero sense. Just like the animal wards that attract and distract spirits, that ALSO turn up in said realm. For some utterly unexplained reason, the realm of the dead - a place it takes some serious knowledge in rituals to access by the game's logic - is just, well, a place, and one character has literally made a lab in there.
Like, you the player (as a Banisher, a powerful dealer in the arts of managing souls and spirits) can with great difficulty physically traverse this treacherous realm by use of ancient magic taught by a witch of the realm, and he (a mostly self-taught "demonologist") has moved actual fucking furniture there. He's not super powerful or anything, just a curious scholarly person. And he's carved himself a fucking pocket dimension lab in the land of the dead. Using some shit he learned off some dude in France his dad once chatted with he corresponds with.
And that ALSO makes no sense, by the way. The game takes great pains - GREAT pains - to show how the curse placed upon New Eden by the powerful malevolent spirit that killed your partner and her mentor (the reason either of you even came to the area) has sealed the area away from all access. Like, there's a whole beach whose backdrop is the mass of shipwrecks caused by the unnatural storm the spirit has created.
And yes, you got there - but on a row boat, on a bizarrely becalmed night, because the ship that brought you to the New World refused to come any closer to such an accursed place. So, uh... how the fuck's he getting mail from FRANCE? All the bridges, canonically, have been destroyed to seal the area off from Boston. It's a whole big thing in the game that the people of New Eden are living in a forever winter that has left the land barren from the spirit's ire - which by the way seems to end the very second you awake after nearly dying yourself - and are miserably trying to survive in a land that very much wants them dead, sealed away from all support of the rest of the colonies. But the international post's fine?
Now, it bears mentioning that none of this is going to be why the game, despite great press, did badly. That's a combination of being a Don't Nod game (them wokeys wot made that woke Life is Strange series) being published by Focus (not the biggest publisher and mostly famous for Games Workshop video games) and a poor release window (2024 had some mega games, and this was not one). Oh, and typical UE jank™ (the camera's a POS, the combat is frustratingly obtuse and layered, and it's no Witcher no matter how hard it tries). It is however making it bloody hard for me to try and finish the damn game (which to be frank I started because similarly I'm finding Silksong a fucking slog).
It just feels so weird that they go to real pains to do some genuinely great worldbuilding, a world where ghosts are very much confirmed real, of witch trials, witch hunters, Puritans, Native Americans, struggle, strife, and wars of faith and supernatural phenomena, and then there's just... so many holes in the logic that are frustratingly "this is a game mechanic and nothing more" if not "yeah, we put zero effort into this aspect". It could be great. Instead, it's fine.
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theartofmadeline
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