BANISH

Demons appear a lot in fantasy stories and role-playing games, yet their lore seems to be lost in translation most of the time. In essence, demons are summoned beings that are either controlled by someone, or in control of someone. Hence, they seldom make their way to the living world by themselves.

BANISH is a fighting game in which two players must kill each other using swords, as well as use the body of their adversaries to feed a huge demon. The fighting mechanics are about as basic as they can get, given the fact that you can only perform a simple attack and jump around. However, the demon part is quite exciting, although it needs more elements to make the game replayable in the long run.

It only takes one hit to perform a kill, so the battles certainly won’t be too epic. However, it’s not enough to kill the other player in order to feed the demon, since you also have to carry his body to the shrine and throwing it on top. There are a total of three phases to this, and your demon can perform a powerful move to banish the other player from existence when you manage to feed him the third corpse.

Although the battles are very basic, maybe they could be more interesting if the levels were more diverse. In the current state, you basically just have to fight on the lowest platform, because you cannot really go back up after that. The melee weapons make it even trickier to employ any strategies, because it all resumes to who strikes first.

At least you can dash a short distance and use this as a way to defend yourself, but it’s clearly not enough to make the experience fun over long periods of time. In fact, it takes two or three matches to see everything the game has to offer, which is a shame. Granted, this is a jam game developed in a very short time period, so it could certainly be improved in the future.

In the end, BANISH has something going here, but it’s not enough at the moment. The way demons were integrated into the game is quite engaging, but there’s nothing exciting happening in the meantime. Hence, more mechanics need to be added, as well as a better combat system.