Summary
- Games often adopt unnecessary trends, resulting in bloated and mediocre end products. Resources should be focused on perfecting mechanics that serve the story.
- Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden checks off the expected features of a game at its price point, but these features lack purpose and don't necessarily make the game better.
- The storytelling in Banishers is compelling, but it's overshadowed by the inclusion of combat, climbing mechanics, collectibles, and other unnecessary elements adopted from popular AAA games.
One of the great tragedies of covering the game industry is that again and again, I see games that could have been great adopting trends that they don’t have to, making the end product bloated and mediocre. To make their games competitive in the triple-A market, there’s an urge to make bigger, open worlds, with some kind of platforming, with evolving combat and skill trees. Already limited resources get misdirected to mechanics that don’t serve the story they’re trying to tell ꦿinstead of being used to perfect the mechanics that do. That’s what’s happened with Banishers: Ghosts of New🐻 Eden, and it’s breaking my heart.
From the moment I started Banishers, it ꦅwas clear that it was checking off boxes on a list of things that gamers expect of a game with this price point. Environments that you inexplicably have to climb around, complete with yellow paint to indicate interactivity? Check. Skill🧸 trees and equipment upgrades swamped with numbers indicating incremental, fractional improvements to your character’s skills in combat? Check. Collectibles strewn and a region completion percentage on your map to incentivise you to explore every nook and cranny of the world? Check. In and of themselves, these things don’t automatically make a game bad, but when they exist for the sake of existing, we really have to question why these are the traits that allegedly define ‘big’ games.
The damage that Ubisoft has done to modern open-world desi๊gn simply cannot be understated.
It’s a shame, because Banishers’ story is so compelling. Every character I meet is distinct, well-acted, and interesting, and that’s what makes the core gameplay loop so appealing. The unique parts of the game are without a doubt the strongest – the process of investigating a haunting makes me feel like Sherlock Holmes if he were written by Shirley Jackson. I get to summon ghosts (through a menu, which is boring, but whatever) and figure out why they’re still tied to the earth. I get to help peo🎉ple, whether that’s ghosts that want to move on, or people who aඣre being tormented by them. .
But in order to get to all that fun stuff, I have to do all the other janky, half-baked stuff that was shoved in there to justify the game’s price. I have to whack ghosts and possessed wolves with my sword, because Don’t Nod ไis trying to make a game that will appeal to fans of triple-As, which means it has to include combat. I have to climb walls and squeeze through oh so many cracks to navigate the game’s world instead of having smaller, dense worlds with straightforward level design, because every triple-A has it. I have to collect resources. I have to clear ghost nests and explore the void in capital-C Content literally called “Endless Voids”. I have to unlock powers and come back to areas later to fully explore them, even though there’s no discernable reason that Metroidvania mechanics wouldꦉ contribute positively to the story.
This game is Frankenstein's Monster. There's another gothic horror reference!
I like Don’t Nod’s previous games because they include what’s necessary and eliminate what’s not. The original Life is Strange was so interesting precisely because it created a time-manipulating mechanic that worked with the story, and it didn’t feel bloated or like the game didn’t respect my time. Banishers has that same nuanced storytelling ability, but it insists on wasting my time with mechanics to make it feel more like Assassin’s Creed Valhalla or The Witcher 3. Please, I don’t want to fight any more random spectres. I just want to hel🌠p my girlfriend go to heaven.
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