Don’t Nod built its reputation on games where a choice costs you something. Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden, released February 13, 2024, pushes that idea as far as the studio has taken it. The setup is simple and cruel: two lovers hunt ghosts, one becomes a ghost, and the game asks what the survivor will do about it. The answer depends on how much of his own oath he is willing to break.
Trailer, via Focus Entertainment.
Red mac Raith and Antea Duarte
Red mac Raith is a former soldier from Scotland. Antea Duarte is a Cuban-born mystic and scholar, and she is his mentor as well as his lover. Both are Banishers — itinerant warrior mystics who banish hauntings. The pair travel to the New English settlement of New Eden at the invitation of their friend Reverend Charles Davenport.
Davenport has already confronted the spirit plaguing his town, and impatiently. He dies of a heart attack before the couple can help him. Red and Antea meet his widow, Esther, and the town’s selectmen: governor and self-avowed demonologist Fairefax Haskell, militia leader Captain Saul Pennington, and the gruff huntress known as “Thickskin” Newsmith.
Then the Nightmare arrives. On the couple’s first night in New Eden, Red cannot find Antea, panics, and rushes to the meetinghouse to face the spirit alone. The creature is far more powerful than anything they expected. It kills Antea and throws Red down the cliffs below.
A Beachside Cave and a Witch’s Errand
Red wakes in a deserted cave by the shore. A young woman called “Seeker” tends him and says her mistress, a witch named Siridean, ordered her to do it. Soon after, Red meets Antea’s haunting spirit. The two commit to returning to New Eden to recover her body.
That is where Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden splits. The pair can commit to resurrecting Antea through a necromantic ritual called Lesser Palingenesis, which demands a sizable sacrifice of people. Or they can let Antea ascend peacefully to her afterlife. The rest of the game follows the colony after its flight from New Eden, and the various degrees of complicity its people carry from a trial.
The premise is the sharpest thing here. A ghost hunter whose partner is now the thing he hunts has a built-in engine, and Don’t Nod does not waste it.
Two Fighters, One Body
Combat in Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden is third-person and built on a split. Red carries conventional weaponry. Antea brings spirit abilities. Players combine the two to defeat and banish the souls tormenting the living.
The structure is an action role-playing game, and the choices are frequent and load-bearing. Decisions change the story and the fate of New Eden’s inhabitants, living people and wandering souls alike. The question the game keeps asking is how much of the ghost-hunting vow Red will compromise for the sake of a lover who became one of the spirits he is sworn to banish.
That is a real question, not a menu dressed up as one. The game’s direction is decided at the cave, and the two paths do not converge into the same ending with different lighting.
What New Eden Gets Right
The setting does a lot of quiet work. New Eden, 1695, is a haunted wild of North America, and the game treats it as a lore-rich place plagued with supernatural creatures and ancient secrets rather than a backdrop. The town’s selectmen are not decoration. Haskell, Pennington and Newsmith each hold a piece of what happened, and the haunting cases thread through their lives.
The relationship between Red and Antea carries the rest. The game frames itself as a beautiful, intimate and powerful story between two fated lovers, and for once that framing holds. Antea is not a quest objective. She is a co-lead with opinions about what Red should do, and her presence changes how every scene reads.
Here is what the game gives you to work with:
- Red’s arsenal and Antea’s spirit powers, combined in combat
- Haunting cases across New Eden’s communities, solved with wits or force
- Decisions that shift the story and the fate of the town’s inhabitants
- The Lesser Palingenesis ritual, which requires a sizable sacrifice of people
- The alternative: letting Antea ascend peacefully
Where the Tension Sags
The middle of Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden is the weakest part. The colony’s flight from New Eden scatters the cast, and the game spends a long stretch reintroducing people the prologue already established. Haunting cases fill that space. Some land. Others run long, and the combat that supports them does not have enough depth to carry the repetition.
The split between Red’s weapons and Antea’s abilities is a good idea that thins out over time. Once you find the combination that works, the game rarely forces you off it. Encounters stay readable but stop surprising you.
The choice structure also narrows as it goes. The Lesser Palingenesis path and the ascension path are genuinely different, but the game is more comfortable asking the question than sitting in the answer. The final act resolves faster than the setup deserves.
None of this breaks the game. It just keeps a strong premise from becoming a great one.
A Commercial Disappointment for Don’t Nod
Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden received generally positive reviews from critics upon release. It was also a commercial disappointment for Don’t Nod. That combination is familiar for the studio and worth naming plainly, because it says something about what kind of game this is.
It is a mid-budget, story-driven action RPG with a specific hook and no live-service tail. It asks players to sit with an uncomfortable premise for twenty-plus hours. That is not a pitch that sells itself in a trailer, and Don’t Nod has now made several of them.
The commercial result does not change the review. It does change what the game means. A studio that keeps making this kind of thing while it underperforms is making a bet, and the bet is that the work outlasts the launch window.
The Verdict on Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden
Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden is the most coherent thing Don’t Nod has built around a moral premise. The hook is clean, the two leads are worth following, and the choice at the cave is real. New Eden, 1695, is a good place to spend time, and Antea Duarte is one of the better co-leads the studio has written.
What holds it back is the middle. The haunting cases repeat, the combat runs out of ideas, and the game loses nerve at the exact moment it should press hardest. The distance between the premise and the execution is the whole story of this release.
Still, the premise is worth the trip. If you want an action RPG that treats a love story as a mechanical problem rather than a cutscene, Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden is that game. It does not fully solve it. It gets closer than most.
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