Saturday 14 February 2015

The Banner Saga 1 & 2

The Banner Saga 1 & 2

Been Odin out for a decent Viking game on Xbox One? You’re about to be very Loki

The gods are dead… but the world still turns and continues to break. Humanity and their (sometimes) allies the Varl, great horned giants, have been left adrift to make their way through this time of hardship. Old enemies, the Dredge, have once again resurfaced to wage war on civilisation. You travel vast distances across beautiful landscapes reminiscent of the golden years of animation and the decisions you make along the way will have far-reaching implications.”


That’s Arnie Jorgensen there, co-owner and art director at Stoic, telling us about epic Scandi-drama The Banner Saga. We were going to go with ‘imagine a Telltale game about Vikings and gigantic stone robots, animated by the people who made all those terrifying yet beautiful videos you had when you were a child, and also everyone has magnificent beards’ – but that description works, too.

At its beardy heart, The Banner Saga is a role-playing text adventure with strategy-led, turn-based battles thrown in for good measure. There’s also a survival element as you drag your family, clan and small army across the unforgiving land, trying to make the limited supplies last just long enough to let you reach the next village. Now the team is bringing it to Xbox One – as well as the sequel, The Banner Saga 2. With a game that’s got so much going on, what is the focus? Jorgensen argues that it’s up to you. “We were careful to make the turn-based combat very challenging for players with a mind for it,” he says. “But for players that are more interested in the story, combat can be scaled down.” The story is what drives you from battle to battle, but that’s quite a cynical way of looking at it – it’s just as easy to take the combat as another way of continuing the tale.

The Banner Saga 1 & 2

“No one can dodge the story,” Jorgensen says. If you’re one of those people who treats story and cutscenes as extra homework, this game is not for you. Admitting that the game is a “fairly dense saga”, Jorgensen notes that Stoic still hasn’t ever been told to cut back – possibly because of The Banner Saga’s gripping, immersive text adventure segments. The story, Jorgensen says, is the “most powerful part of the experience”, and we’re inclined to agree.

It’s very clever how it’s all done. “A lot is said in very few words,” says Jorgensen – so you never feel weighed down with text, despite the huge amounts of wordage contained within. All the time, you feel tied to the game – to what’s happening – because of how it’s written. You feel as if your input makes a difference to this rag-tag group of survivors, albeit ones with glorious facial hair.

And if story is the heartbeat of it all, then the design is its circulatory system: both supporting and adding to the narrative, the gorgeous, handanimated art infuses the game with a style reminiscent of golden-age animation. Hair flows and flaps in the harsh winds, snow drifts and blows through the sky, and vast, sweeping mountain ranges stand stoically in the background as you and your clan trudge through the snow, banner flying behind you.

You get the feeling it’s cold, unwelcoming and generally unpleasant, and no words have to be said. When you’re told that you’re running low on supplies, or that villagers are begging for your help, you feel immersed in the game and in the story enough to know the weightiness of what it all means – and this is, in no small part, down to that spot-on design.

The Banner Saga 1 & 2

But we want more. “Our greatest compliment is ‘I want more!’,” says Jorgensen. But he worries that it’s also their greatest criticism: “we left nothing on the field by the time we shipped [the first game],” he says. Not only is the studio planning on making The Banner Saga 2, it’s also thinking even more ahead. “We designed the game from the beginning to be a three-part saga and we plan to see it through,” says Jorgensen. And even that might not be the end: “[We] have no interest in abandoning the world we’ve developed after The Banner Saga 3 is done.”

We’re practically plaiting our beards in anticipation – The Banner Saga was easily one of the best, if not most interesting and different games that came out last year. Best of all, we didn’t even have to venture out into the Scandinavian hinterlands even once. We wouldn’t survive. We’ve never killed a moose. We’ve never seen a moose. Luckily, Jorgensen is a little more optimistic. “The blood that flows through my veins is Norse,” he says. “I sit, doing art on the computer, hunched over, for ten hours at least. Day in, day out with arms that should probably be pulling at oars.” Goodness. We’d like to have him in our Nordic clan. “I feel that I would have perished, frozen, face-down in the snow, on the trek to Frostvellr, in the first few minutes of the game – and that’s only if I hid behind a cask in the mead house during the tutorial battle.” Oh. Kate Gray