With The Banner Saga 3, taken with its two previous entries, we’ve gained a masterpiece. It’s now apparent that its beauty always had a function beyond serving as spectacular desktop wallpapers and Twitter banners it imparts of sense of what we’re losing.
Now, though, that beauty falls under the cancerous purple mass that warps being caught within it into monstrosities. That’s always been the case, particularly when The Banner Saga started as a lush world carpeted with green, rolling hills and a skyscraper-sized runestones with figures judging passersby with stony eyes. The hand-painted landscapes? Breathtaking. It’s one of the best reasons to play it, both for the Eyvind Earle (Disney’s Sleeping Beauty)-inspired character designs and for the Icelandic-inspired score of star composer Austin Wintory, who’s in top form here. That means the chances to look around you are also not as common, and that’s occasionally a shame, as you can’t talk about The Banner Saga without mentioning its beauty. Especially with one branch of the storyline, you’re not so much on the run here you’re digging in your heels and fighting. Battles here drop as often as raindrops in a spring shower, to the point that they essentially sideline the Oregon Trail-style metagame that was always one of the series’ highlights. It’s daunting, and frankly, you’ll be better off if you start from the beginning. You can start the saga straight from this game with a full cast of characters if you want, but you’ll have no idea who all these people are if you do. The Banner Saga 3 slams this home by tossing you straight in the middle of a conversation taking place mere moments after the end of the last game. The previous games sometimes wandered a little too freely this one rushes toward its goal and is the better for it. And so The Banner Saga’s tale of a relatively small band trying to achieve the impossible comes off as inspiring.Īnd, yes, it always feels impossible, and now that impossibility fuels urgency at every turn. In rare form for a game studio these days, it’s achieved remarkable success even within the Appleverse across the Mac, iPhone, and iPad. It’s more worthy than its size suggests (although the fact that multiple team members have BioWare pedigrees no doubt helps). Here, though, is little ol’ Stoic Studio.
We’ve seen this kind of thing in games before, of course, but usually it takes a resource-fat studio like BioWare to pull it off. These choices massively affect the ending, particularly those dealing with the sorcerers Eyvind and Juno as they venture into the heart of the earth. As with almost ever decision in The Banner Saga 3, this could have dire consequences. There’s the big choice of whether you play as the archer Rook or his daughter Alette (and to reveal why you have that choice ventures into spoilers), but now you have to deal with choices like choosing whether to shoo away a band of immensely powerful centaurs because it turns out they weren’t so friendly as they look. Remarkably, it manages to maintain this narrative quality even while offering a massive pile of choices in almost every interaction that sometimes kill off key characters with seeming glee.
The Banner Saga has been passionately crowdfunded ever since its 2012 Kickstarter announcement, and while the core gameplay has barely changed from its strangely satisfying mix of Oregon Trail-style sidescroll travel to chessboard battles emphasizing smart positioning, it continues to triumph on the strength of its writing. If you can’t find hope in the game, find hope in the game’s creation.