Commitment can be scarier than any ghost story. When I got married, I spent a lot of time leading up to the wedding borrowing grief from my future self. The prospect of ’til death do we part’ brought forward the stark idea that one day one of us would have to say goodbye to the other. I was suddenly and unexpectedly wracked with anxiety about the mortality of my loved ones, and playing Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden reminded me of this uncomfortable feeling. Antea and Red have each other, to hold and confide in and joke with – but Antea is a ghost, and they have to get ready to say goodbye. That’s the commitment they make to each other.
Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden sees Red and Antea, ghost hunters and life partners, called to settle a curse that’s fallen on the early Massachusetts settler colony of New Eden. The tight-knit, suspicious puritan community aren’t all convinced that the pair can help, seeing their arrival as too little too late – or insufficiently godly – after the loss of their community pillar to the ghost at the centre of the curse.
New Eden Town introduces you to life as a banisher: fighting violent spectres that have forgotten who they were, convincing benevolent ghosts to leave people to grieve in peace, and snooping in people’s belongings to get better answers to your questions. When the pair inadvertently walk into a trap, the townspeople’s suspicions are proved correct – Antea is killed, and the survivors scatter. To help her peacefully pass on, it will be a long journey to loosen the curse’s hold on the area to retrieve her body – and there’s the unthinkable option of taking that same journey to instead resurrect her, going against everything they believe as banishers. Death to the dead, and life to the living.
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