Patient Gamers

The Banner Saga trilogy should be seen as one big game in an episodic format, because it tells one continuous story and the gameplay isn't different between the episodes, it just gets new characters with new abilities and items. And it doesn't make sense to play it in any other order than publication order, since your characters, choices and items carry over from each game to the next.

Now what is Banner Saga? It is an epic tale in a Nordic inspired world about hardship, survivors and what you do in order to survive. You play in a world where the sun stopped moving, the gods stopped responding (and were very much present in the past) and now there are stories about long thought defeated demons from the past coming up from underground and invading the known world. Some people fear it's the end of the world.

But for the moment you are still living in this world and need to somehow survive. You are elected to lead your village to a safer place, wherever that may be. And so you start your long journey in a caravan, where you meet a wide variety of people, some helpful, some malignant, but everybody desperate and you need to decide what to do. Do you search for berries in easily observable terrain or hunt in deeper woods where you might be ambushed by aforementioned demons ... or other desperate survivors less scrupulous than you? Because you also need to keep in mind to have enough supplies for your people, which very quickly makes the decision to take even more poor refugees in without any supplies themselves a lot harder than you might think now. In that regard it is similar in atmosphere to Frostpunk. How far are you going in order to survive? Do you leave behind your humanity? Not all of the characters following you will agree to abandon everybody else and so you have an ongoing dynamic during the whole story.

The second big gameplay part of this game series are turnbased tactical fights of your group against others. It has a unique HP situation: your characters have Strength, which is HP and Attack Strength in one as well as armor which reduces the damage from enemy attacks. So you need to find out how to reduce enemy armor in order to kill your enemies before they do the same to you. You're named characters are either small humans or bigger Varls, a giant race with lots of strength behind their hits. You get fame from fights, which acts as currency and XP here.

Playing this game means accepting that you could fail 6 hours in because you don't have any supplies anymore and your people are abandoning you and then restarting. If you are fine with that (or save scumming/cheating, I don't judge) then a very beautifully depicted world, rich with stories and world building awaits you. Each game roughly takes 10 h and while the main locations are pre determined, the story that happens is very much depending on your prior decisions and it's not just Telltales "only optics of important decision making". And without spoilers: I was surprised how many variations of the finale there are, depending on your way to get there.

Oh and I completely forget to mention the music: it's epic in the literal sense of the word. The islandish, I think, lyrics really portrays the 'epic tale told by bards' feeling. It's by Austin Wintory, so of course it's awesome.