The Banner Saga 3

Banners, then and now, are often a curious amalgamation of plain communication and naked aggression. They’re well-known as heraldic devices, displaying a coat of arms to identify one side to the other on the battlefield, usually just before they were about to attack each other. However, they’re also just a means of communicating who or what a place or thing belongs to. If you’re shipwrecked,…

Tagged with feature, Overthinking Games, Stoic, Versus Evil, The Banner Saga, The Banner Saga 2, The Banner Saga 3.

My 2018 in games had me dealing with failure in multiple ways. Designed to move further and further away from the fantasy of the all-powerful player ever looking for an appropriate challenge, these games teach to forgive and accept – forgiving someone a past hurt, accepting the lack of a perfect solution to a problem. From the satisfyingly familiar to a type of game I…

Tagged with Bandai Namco, Best Games of 2018, Devolver Digital, feature, Level-5, Nomada Studio, Stoic, Subset Games, Supergiant Games, Versus Evil, Gris, Hades, Into the Breach, Ni No Kuni II: Revenant Kingdom, The Banner Saga 3.

From the outset, everything in The Banner Saga seems designed to encourage you to be careful. As you lead your caravan towards safety, you try to keep people alive by rationing food, managing the number of your followers and weighing the dangers of the unknown. Anyone who has ever given a soldier in XCOM a custom name knows that it takes very little to get…

Tagged with feature, Stoic, The Joy Of, The Banner Saga, The Banner Saga 2, The Banner Saga 3.

The Vikings have long ago invaded the coasts of pop culture on their dragon-headed longships and carved out their own Danelaw in the realm of video games. In recent years, they’ve grown even bolder, taking over most genres from RTS to RPG, classic point and click adventure to action, with an utter disregard towards distinctions between AAA and indie. They’ve settled in Hellblade and Frostrune,…

Tagged with feature, Crusader Kings II, Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice, The Banner Saga, The Banner Saga 2, The Banner Saga 3, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt.

After waiting two long years for the final instalment of Stoic's fantastical strategy trilogy, The Banner Saga 3 begins in the best possible way. It picks up where the second The Banner Saga 2 left off, and one of the first things you get to do is punch your scheming arch nemesis - who probably made your last moments of that second game a right…

Tagged with feature, review, Stoic, wot i think, The Banner Saga, The Banner Saga 2, The Banner Saga 3.

The bearded warrior looks exhausted. Part of a band of mercenaries, he blinks slowly at us. Even while the player chooses their next words, the crease-eyed humans and horned Varls of The Banner Saga 3 stand there, blinking slowly. Their hair fluttering, eyes searching you for intent. These are quiet moments of incidental detail. Twitching moustaches, billowing capes, tensing fists. They are looping animations, designed…

Tagged with feature, Stoic, Versus Evil, The Banner Saga, The Banner Saga 2, The Banner Saga 3.