The Banner Saga (2014)
The Banner Saga is a 2014 role-playing (rpg) video game made by Stoic and Versus Evil.
The sun has stopped in the sky and the gods are dead. Across a frozen Norse-inflected land, caravans of humans and horned giants called varl flee an implacable enemy of living stone. Stoic's tactical RPG moves on two fronts: grid battles where wounding an enemy weakens its attack, and the long march between them, where you ration supplies and decide who eats. Hand-drawn in the style of old Disney animation and scored by Austin Wintory, it treats every choice as heavy. People die and stay dead. Bleak, beautiful, and quietly devastating.
Quick answers
What is The Banner Saga about?
The sun has stopped in the sky and the gods are dead. Across a frozen Norse-inflected land, caravans of humans and horned giants called varl flee an implacable enemy of living stone. Stoic's tactical RPG moves on two fronts: grid battles where wounding an enemy weakens its attack, and the long march between them, where you ration supplies and decide who eats. Hand-drawn in the style of old Disney animation and scored by Austin Wintory, it treats every choice as heavy. People die and stay dead. Bleak, beautiful, and quietly devastating.
When was The Banner Saga released?
The Banner Saga was released on 14 January 2014.
Who made The Banner Saga?
The Banner Saga was made by Stoic and Versus Evil.
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The Banner Saga in our writing
- Companion guide: The CRPG Renaissance: How Kickstarter Brought the Genre Back from the Dead
- Companion guide: Vikings & Norse
A few thoughts on The Banner Saga
Vikings shares its cold, fatalistic Norse world and its taste for hard leadership under constant threat. For the same doom-laden migration and myth, the film The Northman channels Viking revenge as ritual, and Austin Wintory's own score rewards a straight listen the way a great soundtrack should.
Myths where the old gods can't save you anymore
The gods are already dead when The Banner Saga begins, and that same sense of myths running out of road drives Vikings, The Northman, God of War, and The Song of Achilles: warriors moving through a Norse or Greek world where fate is fixed, glory is cold comfort, and the old stories no longer promise anyone a happy ending.
Heavy metal that sounds like the end of the world
Austin Wintory's score gives The Banner Saga its funeral weight, and the same lean-into-doom energy runs through The Number of the Beast, Piece of Mind, Painkiller, and The Spectre Within: records built on galloping riffs and apocalyptic imagery, the kind of heavy metal that sounds right playing while a caravan marches toward an enemy it can't outrun.
Stories where survival always costs you something real
The Banner Saga makes every choice on the march cost something real, someone eats less, someone doesn't make it, and that same weight sits behind Watchmen, Peaky Blinders, Refugee, and Redwall: stories where getting a group to safety, or just getting through the day, always takes a piece of somebody with it.