Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden Beginner Tips - Combat, Choices, and Haunt Cases

Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden is a single-player action RPG by DON’T NOD and Focus Entertainment about two ghost hunters, Red mac Raith and Antea Duarte, investigating cursed New Eden in 1695. This guide covers the base game on PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X/S.

Content warning: Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden is rated Teen and includes blood and gore, language, use of alcohol and tobacco, violence, supernatural horror, grief, and morally heavy choices. This guide stays non-graphic and focuses on play.

This is a spoiler-light beginner guide. It will help you approach combat, haunting cases, choices, exploration, and upgrades without listing exact haunt solutions, collectible routes, ending math, or optimized builds. The game itself is approachable, but the difficulty can rise if you ignore side cases, under-upgrade gear, or force one combat style.

Essential Tips

1. Treat Red and Antea as One Combat Kit

Switching roles is the point, not a panic button.

Red brings weapons and human reach; Antea brings spiritual power. If you only use the character who feels strongest in the first few hours, fights can become stiff. Open encounters by reading enemy behavior, then rotate between Red’s arsenal and Antea’s abilities when pressure changes. Think of them as a paired rhythm: Red controls space and follows through, while Antea helps break supernatural pressure and keeps the fight from becoming a simple dodge-and-swing loop.

Do not wait until you are almost dead to use Antea. The game is built around both characters solving the same combat problem together.

2. Solve Haunting Cases Before You Feel Underpowered

Side cases are character growth, not just story dressing.

Haunting cases ask you to talk to people, gather information, understand what happened, and decide how a case should close. They also feed progression, especially Antea’s Evolution. If the main road starts feeling harder, pause the push forward and clear a few available cases. You gain more than lore: you get the materials, growth, and practice that make the next fights smoother.

Keep a consistent habit in each case. Speak to everyone, inspect the area, follow the clues, then decide. Rushing to the final choice can leave the story feeling muddy and may send your long-term path in a direction you did not intend.

3. Pick a Choice Direction Early

The game cares about the pattern behind your decisions.

Banishers puts pressure on Red’s oath and Antea’s fate. The important beginner advice is not to chase a perfect answer in every scene; it is to understand what kind of story you are choosing. Some choices resolve hauntings by judging the living. Others deal with ghosts more directly. Your repeated decisions shape the broader outcome, so avoid treating every case like an isolated reward screen.

If you want a clean first playthrough, decide what Red is trying to honor and let that guide case outcomes. You can still role-play nuance, but random swings from one philosophy to another make the ending harder to predict.

4. Use Shelters as Planning Stops

A shelter is the moment to check gear, upgrades, and direction.

When you reach a shelter, do not just rest and leave. Review equipment, spend available progression points, look at what materials you are missing, and check whether nearby side objectives can help. Shelters are also good mental save points: if the map has opened up, choose one short objective before wandering.

This matters because Banishers has a lot of optional structure: cases, side activities, chests, materials, haunted areas, and collectibles. A shelter stop turns that sprawl into a plan.

5. Do Not Chase Every Collectible Immediately

Some routes are ability-gated.

New Eden is full of gear, chests, materials, Soul Grabbers, treasure-map leads, and other collection hooks. Some are not meant to be cleared the first time you pass through an area. If a path looks blocked by an ability you do not have, mark the place mentally and move on. The game gives you more tools as the story continues.

For a first run, prioritize shelters, cases, useful gear, and obvious materials. Save exact collectible cleanup for a later route or a dedicated guide.

Combat Basics

Keep Pressure Without Getting Greedy

Combat rewards commitment, but not button mashing. Use short attack strings, watch what enemies are about to do, and reposition before you get surrounded. If a fight introduces a new enemy type, take the first exchange slowly. Learn whether it punishes distance, melee greed, or standing still.

Antea’s powers should interrupt your routine. If Red’s weapon attacks are bouncing off the same problem, switch. If Antea has opened the enemy up, return to Red and capitalize. The goal is not to prove one character is better; it is to make enemies respond to two different kinds of threat.

Upgrade Around Your Real Habits

Do not spend upgrades on a fantasy version of your playstyle. If you dodge constantly, support that. If you rely on ranged pressure, respect that. If you keep forgetting a move exists, do not build your early plan around it yet. Banishers lets gear and skills shape how fights feel, but beginner success comes from strengthening the actions you already perform reliably.

Materials come from exploration, merchants, and side objectives, so upgrades also reward curiosity. Before a hard fight, ask whether you have actually used the systems the game has been feeding you.

Use Difficulty as a Pacing Tool

The guide is beginner-focused, but the game is not just a visual novel with combat attached. If you are here mainly for the story and choices, lowering combat friction is valid. If you want the action RPG layer to bite, keep the difficulty where enemies force you to switch, dodge, and upgrade. The right setting is the one that lets you engage with both the haunt cases and the fights instead of resenting one half.

Haunting Cases and Choices

Haunting cases are the heart of the game. They are not simple fetch quests with a moral label stapled on at the end. Each one asks you to investigate people, ghosts, guilt, grief, and hidden motives. The better you are at reading the case, the more deliberate your final call will feel.

Use this routine:

1. Talk before judging - Hear the living side and the dead side where possible.
2. Follow every obvious clue - Do not close a case just because the first explanation sounds convincing.
3. Check how the choice fits your oath - Decide whether this is a case-by-case exception or part of your long-term path.
4. Accept consequences without reloading constantly - The game is strongest when choices carry weight.

For ending pressure, stay spoiler-light: repeated case outcomes matter. You do not need exact math on a first playthrough, but you should avoid random decisions if you care about where Red and Antea land.

Exploration and Upgrades

New Eden is built for return visits. A blocked path, locked chest, or visible object out of reach is often a reminder to come back with more abilities, not a sign that you missed a hidden jump. When you enter a new region, activate shelters, note merchants, gather materials, and clear nearby cases before obsessing over every icon.

Spend money and materials with purpose. Gear can come from chests, merchants, rewards, and exploration, but that does not mean every item deserves equal investment. Keep equipment that supports your actual combat flow, then upgrade a compact set instead of spreading materials thinly across everything you find.

Side objectives such as supernatural combat sites and exploration challenges are useful when you need materials, practice, or a break from heavy story scenes. Rotate them in between haunting cases so the game does not become one long chain of emotionally loaded decisions.

Common Mistakes to Avoid

1. Leaving Antea out of combat - You make fights harder by treating Red as the only real fighter.

2. Skipping haunting cases - You delay Essence, practice, and story context when you skip them.

3. Choosing without an oath in mind - You can muddy your ending direction by picking random case outcomes.

4. Upgrading moves you rarely use - You waste early materials when your build does not match your habits.

5. Forcing blocked collectible routes - You lose time against ability gates that are meant for later.

6. Leaving shelters without reviewing upgrades - You miss the best moment to upgrade, review materials, and choose your next objective.

7. Judging before investigating - You risk making a final choice before understanding the people involved.

8. Hoarding every material - You make current fights harder by saving upgrades for a perfect item you may not need.

9. Keeping the wrong difficulty for your goal - You can tune combat friction without weakening the story or choice experience.

Summary

Category	Top Tip
Combat	Switch between Red and Antea as a normal rhythm
Cases	Investigate fully before making the closing choice
Choices	Pick an oath direction and keep it in mind
Progression	Solve hauntings when Antea needs Evolution points
Upgrades	Invest in gear that supports how you actually fight
Exploration	Return later when an obstacle looks ability-gated
Shelters	Use every rest stop to plan, upgrade, and review the map
Collectibles	Save exact cleanup for a dedicated route