Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden – A Game I Enjoyed Until It Wore Me Down
Just before the final battle, the main character says, “She has suffered enough, and so have we.”
I have never related to a line more as a player.
Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden is a game I genuinely enjoyed at first. I played on the easiest difficulty, which let me focus almost entirely on the story, atmosphere, and investigations — and in those areas, the game shines. The world is beautiful, the hauntings are compelling, and the narrative pacing works well when you aren’t wrestling with combat. None of my issues come from performance or visuals. The problem is everything that happens between the good parts.
Travel Slowly Becomes the Real Gameplay Loop
As the hours stack up, the game shifts from discovery and story into a constant cycle of travel → traversal → more travel. Forests, cliffs, ladders, backtracking, and long stretches of empty space start to dominate the experience. Reaching Fort Jericho took nearly an hour of running and climbing, only for the game to immediately send me somewhere else before I could even enter. The mine shaft sequence was another hour of environmental navigation with barely any story progression to show for it.
It’s not difficulty, it’s density. Too much space between meaningful moments.
Optional Content Starts Feeling Like a Punishment
At one point I found a Rift and my first reaction was not “Cool, bonus content,” but “If this teleports me somewhere inconvenient, I am going to regret it.” That was the moment it started to feel like the game was not just making exploration tedious. It felt like it was actively trying to punish you for taking the time to explore or complete bonus content. When a game makes you calculate the travel tax before touching a side activity, something is off.
Exploration Feels Logistical, Not Rewarding
I love exploration heavy games like Elden Ring, Horizon, and Outer Worlds, but those worlds feel alive and productive. Banishers often feels like someone took a Diablo map, removed everything interesting, stretched it until it takes twenty minutes to cross, and then added Tomb Raider style climbing segments. The issue is not the rewards. It is the ratio of time spent to progress made.
Progress Per Hour Is Shockingly Low
Session after session, I found myself asking, “What actually happened?” Not in terms of loot, but in terms of meaningful narrative or mechanical advancement. After a while it even started to feel like the game was using long stretches of slow traversal to deliver pieces of the story, and the payoff never felt like it justified the effort it took to get there. Compared to games where every hour feels productive, Banishers often left me feeling like I had accomplished almost nothing.
Weak Skill Trees and Gamey Combat
The ability trees have ideas that seem like they could support interesting, targeted builds, but most of them ended up feeling useless in actual play. On the easiest story mode there was never enough challenge to make any of the more technical abilities feel necessary or worth investing in. Combat also leans on artificial mechanics like dodging forward into attacks to trigger effects. It is not challenging. It is unintuitive. Harder difficulties may balance this out, but on story mode the entire system feels shallow.
The Emotional Core Doesn’t Fully Land
The central dilemma of bringing Antea back or letting her ascend never hit me the way the game wanted. Red is a Banisher, and solving ghost problems is literally the job, so the emotional logic and the professional logic kept pulling in different directions for me. The game clearly expects the emotional weight of the situation to carry the choice, but I never connected with it in the way the story assumes you will.
By Hour 44, I Was Begging for the End
By the time I reached the 40 hour mark, the constant travel had worn me down. Every major quest seemed designed to send me across huge stretches of the map just to trigger the next small step, and the amount of traversal required started to feel like the real obstacle rather than the ghosts or the story. By hour 46, I had completely given up on optional content and pushed straight through the main storyline just to finish the game.
Final Verdict
Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden has a strong heart, a great atmosphere, and genuinely engaging investigations, but the experience is increasingly buried under long stretches of travel and constant traversal. The further you get, the more the game feels like it is making you work to reach the parts that actually shine, and that imbalance eventually wears the experience down.
