From the company that made Life is Strange and Jusant, since the latter, thinking DontNOD had found a sweet spot, my eyes had locked on Banishers: Ghost of New Eden and was awaiting it with high expectations.
I hadn't purchased it at lunch because, after informing myself, I decided to shelf it for the time being. The game was gifted to me for my birthday, so the choice was made for me.

The story follows the adventures of Red and Anthea, two banishers romantically involved, who invited by their friend and mentor Charles, go to New Eden, a community of Puritans, to banish a ghost he alone could not. During this mission, the ghost turns out to be exponentially stronger than expected, a nightmare, and Anthea dies and becomes a ghost herself haunting Red, with the tie to this world being her body. The nightmare being so powerful can only mean it was wronged gravely, meaning the people of New Eden have lied to them, allowed the team to underestimate the threat, and contributed to Anthea's death, only so they could keep their secrets. They must get to the bottom of it to learn the truth, understand and weaken the nightmare, to then make their way back to New Eden to face it again.
A choice is given to Red:
Sacrifice the lives of these sinners to bring Anthea back to life.
Ascend or banish the ghosts he'll find, instead, contributing to Athea ascending this plane peacefully, unlike the ghosts you banish.
The story sounds interesting and captivating...the way I presented it.
Instead, the writing POV keeps blue-balling the player by keeping the objective of going back like a dangling carrot, and the power of the nightmare is only speculated at first to be connected to the sins of New Edeners. The various stories you'll learn of, act only as padding to the story instead of a component of it, often resulting as frustration as more unlock.

The intro to the game is one of the longest I've ever played with almost 5h of playtime before the initial structure of the gameplay and its various systems is unlocked.
The game is simply too long for what it offers, and it's so stretched that even the banter between the characters starts repeating quite early.
Funnily, concept arts are used for loading screens, but besides the low quality and detail, some don't even feature the final design of the characters with Anthea being a different race.

Ghost hunting often sums up to learning what happened, then coming up with a verdict, and being able to peacefully ascend all ghosts you meet, even if they were extremely wronged and angry, and want to kill the haunted. Letting the player choose which ritual to perform, while interesting at first, quickly becomes a nuisance since only one is the correct one. It's just another extra menu on the way. I would have preferred to have a more interesting cutscene instead, maybe with more than one alpha mask model for the knife incisions done when drawing a rune since it's the same regardless of sand, wood, or rock.

The writing of the side missions is sub-par, often being quite simple or nonsensical, like during a quest, when following the tracks of a stolen cart and they go up a wall and over a tree trunk. It did not keep in mind the pacing of the story, often breaking immersion and the moment by changing gear completely.
Representation matters and as a member of the LGBTQIA+ community I was happy to see some forward topics like interracial marriage, girl bossing, or a queer couple at the beginning of the game and in the main story, but by the time I got to the end, it became a bit redundant with most stories featuring topics such as. I am again thankful for the representation, I simply wished the game touched on a larger variety of topics.

Exploration is limited to running around and pressing the interaction button for all parkour in the game, sometimes requiring to press forward alongside it.
Walking around from A to B is quite tedious, and the map while big, is quite empty of anything interesting in it, besides materials. The loot is next to useless having even most chests, even ones behind long optional puzzles, reward materials.
Missions, often point only at an area, forcing the player to waste a lot of time looking around for what they are looking for. Exploration is further hindered by most shortcuts connecting two relatively close points, while sometimes having ledges that can't be climbed back, forcing you to repeat a long round trip.
Map progression is Metroid-like, with abilities gatekeeping points of interest, and the map showing the shortcut icon before unlocking it. Exploration becomes confusing, especially when deviating from the main story path, and often the time invested towards a ? on the map is wasted.
One of the gates is roots that need to be destroyed, similar to runic chests in the new God of Wars, but compared to them these give no good visual hint to the player of how many there are to destroy, be that 2 or 5, often blending in making it not just time-consuming, but trial and error.
The worst offender for exploration though is fast travel, limited only and exclusively at and in between bonfires, of which there are not many.

Combat, while it might look interesting at first and somewhat inspired by the recent GoWs, is naught but a foundation of it. It has the same structure and depth as a game like Hellblade, with 10 times its length and frequency. Constantly, a barrage of enemies attacks you every few steps in your direction, but the enemy types can be counted on a hand. Not even bosses are safe, with the ONE less gimmicky - yes one - being reused for in-map activity.
Little to nothing is added to the formula going forward, making combat formulaic and the same from start to end with the ability tree simply numerical increases of the already existing abilities.

Equipment is at best scarce and at worst not rewarded for anything worth doing in the game. Every equipment slot has options, from armor to weapons, rings, brooches, and...the healing potion?
Everything is upgradable, and each upgrade costs a lot of materials, resulting in changing it or choosing to upgrade a big commitment. All equipment, besides a different passive perk, doesn't offer a gameplay difference and is only aesthetic.
Not everything has to be upgradable, and a system akin to the new GoWs where, for example, you upgrade one weapon, and then switch charms for perks would have worked immensely better and avoided having the map showered in materials and forcing the player to spam-collect at all corners.

Technically, the game is made in Unreal Engine 5, but compared to many other releases lately, is merely an import of a UE4 project without taking advantage of any new technology like Lumen or Nanites.
Accessibility options are barely existent, with a forced narrow FOV that could cause motion sickness to some players, topped with an aggressive camera shake that can't be disabled: a killer combo, BEWARE!
Thankfully, the awful menu parallax effect can be turned off.
The auto-saving system of the game is lovely and can really save you at times, from the game-breaking bugs and unpatched bugged quests.
What wasn't well done, especially for users with mouse and keyboard was dialogue selection, not including the mouse pointer as an option at all.
In general quality control did not seem high, with typos making not just release, but many patches.

This game speaks about curses, and when it was gifted to me I felt like it came with one. I felt forced into playing it because it was a gift and because on paper: I should have liked it. With hindsight, the original hunch I had that the game might be too long for what it offered was correct.
This was one of those games that would have stayed on my wishlist until deleted years later, and I would not wish it to anyone gifted, let alone purchased.
I'm sure it's great for someone, just not me. There's a demo: TRY IT.

4/10

Don't know what I expected from this dev.
Don't ever buy games out of pure boredom.

So, today we're dealing with the rare guest - interesting single player game. Interesting story, interesting side quests - what could go wrong? Not much, but nevertheless: backtracking (which can be forgiven only in Ori/hollow knight and the like), questionmarks (deadly boring by the endgame), bad battles (I literally hated battles in this game so much, that I changed difficulty to minimal just to finish them quicker) and that's all, I suppose. You can say that these things can ruin your joy from this game - and I could agree with you. But advantages are stronger and after all - it is a really good single player RPG - can you name many games like that?