Highlights

  • Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden introduces unique Scourge enemies for challenging combat and rewarding upgrades.
  • Players uncover the dark truth behind the haunting spirits, learning about betrayal and sacrifice in New Eden.
  • Summoning Scourges in specific locations leads to increased stats and upgrades, crucial for facing late-game challenges.

Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden is a new action RPG title from developers Don’t Nod, which translates its trademark interactive storytelling into a sprawling supernatural epic. The title tells the story of Antea and Red, two Banishers sent to the settlement of New Eden to investigate a series of hauntings. As Banishers, it is Red and Antea’s duty to ensure that any ghosts they encounter depart the mortal realm, and the title introduces increasingly intimidating spirits, or enemy types, as the story progresses. One such enemy is the Scourge, a large corporeal being that haunts the locations of especially traumatic events. While combat with the Scourge is usually optional, fans will find that these unique enemies offer just as much risk as they do reward.

Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden sees Red and Antea investigate a series of hauntings throughout the settlement of New Eden. While the story is largely focused on the spirits haunting New Eden’s settlers, the pair also encounter a range of vengeful spirits in the settlement’s surrounding locals. These spirits often reside in sites associated with death and loss, such as cemeteries, forests, shipwrecks, and abandoned buildings. However, some exceptionally strong and violent spirits are only found at the sites of especially devastating loss. These enemies, called Scourge, must be summoned using a special ritual, and doing so enters players into some of Banishers’ most difficult enemy encounters.

Banishers- Ghosts of New Eden protagonists engaged in a moment
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The Scourge is Introduced in Banishers’ First Major Haunting

The moment that players reach the Hunter's Camp in the Dark Woods, they hear terrifying tales of a Beast that resides in the woods. While the camp’s leaders, the Newsmith Sisters, swear that the Beast doesn’t exist, the Banishers take it upon themselves to investigate its connection with the disappearance of a large group of settlers. When the pair finally discover the Beast’s whereabouts, they are confronted with a terrible truth. The Beast is very real, and its identity sheds light on the story of the Newsmiths. One which directly connects their actions to the curse lingering over all of New Eden.

The Banishers discover that the Beast is made up of the spirits of the missing group of settlers, who were killed as part of a test set up by Thickskin Newsmith. To ensure that only the strongest settlers made it to the hunting camp, Thickskin gave each settler a whistle and told them to use it in times of dire need. As it turns out, the whistles were made to call wolves, who descended on any settler who used them, eventually killing the entire group, and melding their anguished spirits into Scourge. One such settler was Kate Newsmith's secret lover, Deborah, whose spirit stands as the one responsible for New Eden’s all-encompassing curse, Banishers' The Nightmare. Though part of Deborah’s soul is released upon the Beast’s defeat, other pieces reside elsewhere. Discovering how settlers across all of New Eden wronged Deborah, leading to the curse, is the primary focus of Banishers’ narrative.

Scourge Summonings Offer Players a Rewarding Challenge

Following players' confrontation with the Beast, new Scourges are introduced in a series of optional boss battles, each featuring unique combat parameters. While Scourge hauntings exist in many of Banishers' haunted locations, they will only appear after players defeat the Beast. To face a Scourge, players must locate sites of exceptionally strong spiritual energy and perform a Scourge summoning. These rituals require the use of items native to that environment, so fans will often find themselves needing to return to the source of a Scourge after completing some tasks in the surrounding area.

Defeating a Scourge rewards players with a Scourge Accretion, a rare item used for upgrading weapons, equipment, or decoctions. Additionally, players receive an increase in all statistics, making Scourge encounters one of the overall best methods of improving Red and Antea’s stats in both combat and survivability. Fans who hope to defeat the Nightmare and free New Eden should consider defeating every Scourge they find, as doing so provides a big boost to any Banisher build. While players can complete the full narrative of Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden having faced only one Scourge, doing so leaves them much more vulnerable to the title’s late-game challenges, potentially bringing the tale of Red and Antea to an early and unfortunate end.