Good writing bogged down by everything else
Tedious is the name of the game
Let's get the good out of the way first :
The writing is quite a few steps beyond solid. The characters are believable, the choices coherent with who they are. In fact, it's what carried me to the end of every single sidequest in the game. The NPCs made me want to know who they were, what they did, and why they did it. I can't stress enough how every single sidequest is its own little story, some of them really nicely meshing with the main story.
Overall, the story is great. It's what got me going.
The acting is mostly great, and otherwise good. No voice actor pulled me out of the game. The two main characters have great chemistry. Some dialogues repeat, which is a bit annoying, but it seem the developer are allergic to leaving their characters silent.
The graphics are solid and sometimes beautiful. They managed to create original environments, and have the player go through it for valid and logical reasons.
I didn't encounter a single bug the whole playthrough.
Now for the bad :
I could get a whole essay on dev cowardice and their inability to let players have agency. Maybe this is it.
Here is the thing : I almost put the level design in the good. It's intricate and would be looping on itself in all the right ways if it was in fact level design. But it's not. What at first looks like a sort of metroidvania-esque world is just a bunch of glorified locked doors with coloured keys.
When the characters get a power, it doesn't let them go through new paths, it only unlocks the prompt to open the way.
The characters doesn't jump, instead, they are placed at the edge ans react to the prompt to go forward.
Most of the progression is slowed down by prompts that take away control. Jumping down ledges, jumping between them, bend down through a hole, climb a wall, make the invisible appear. It's all : push a button = get control taken away.
The power unlocked have slightly (and for a couple of them, completely) different effect depending of if they're used for exploration or for combat, which once again illustrate how little the devs understand what the metroidvania dynamic is supposed to be like.
In the end, it's nothing else than tedious. It slows down the player for the sake of making travel time longer.
The investigation side is also completely absent. There's no deduction, there's no reflection. All the player has to do is to go through the investigation area, pickup all the clues (which they can't not do), the conclusions are spelled out to them, and then they get to make the "choice" at the end of the quest, said choice being between "Banish", which banishes the ghost and send it back to the shadow realm, "Ascend", which helps the ghost pass on, or "Blame" which blames the person they were haunting. Banish and Ascend are mechanically the exact same, and entirely interchangeable, I'll call them both "Banish" from then on.
Depending on the ending you want to get, you should do a majority of "Banish" or "Blame". The consequences of these choices on the ending are spelled out from the get go, with no trap or twist.
This lead to the other pitfall of Banishers : the choices. When I started playing, I saw a lot of the Witcher 2 DNA in this game, but halfway through, it was gone. Sure, it's about a supernatural investigator with a sword who protects people from monsters, and I'm fairly certain it was a huge inspiration for the game, but one fundamental aspect of Witcher is that the choices are mostly in the greys, and that you can't know the true ramifications of your actions until you see them unfold. Banishers does away with those principles. Take the side or the ghost, or of the living. Each choice banishes more nuance from the game.
And at last, the combat. Its only merit is to exist. It has a gimmick, which is to swap between fighting as a living human, or as a ghost. In practice, it's the only original thing it does, and it isn't that interesting. The fights only feel like another tedious chore the player as to do between the great story beats.
In the end, the game overstays its welcome by about half its play time, which is wasted time doing tedious travel, interspersed with annoying combat.
If you're going to buy this game, get it at a discount, play on easy, and don't do any exploration. Spare yourself the tedium as much as you can.
Also, for a game taking place during the colonisation of the US, the natives are surprisingly scarce (a single one appearing the whole playthrough). Kinda weird.
