The Banner Saga

The Banner Saga is a 2014 tactical role-playing game from Stoic, a small studio formed by former BioWare developers and funded on Kickstarter. In a Norse-inspired world where the sun has stopped moving, an armoured race called the Dredge has returned, and you lead a caravan of refugees and warriors across a dying land.

Between battles you manage the caravan: supplies, morale, and choices in conversations and events that can cost lives or lose characters for good. Battles are turn-based on a grid, with armour and strength as separate values, so wearing down an enemy's armour is as important as hurting them.

Its hand-drawn art, inspired by classic animation, and its music by Austin Wintory are exceptional, and its mood is bleak in a way few games manage: the world is ending and you are not going to fix it. Choices have consequences you cannot always predict, and important characters die from them.

The battles are good but can repeat, and the story is a trilogy, completed by two sequels in 2016 and 2018. It is best played as a whole.

The Banner Saga shares Jagged Alliance 2's sense that the people in your party are individuals you can lose to bad decisions, and its campaign of supplies and morale is a cousin of Jagged Alliance 2's money and loyalty. Its subject, a long retreat from the end of the world, is the despair that Jagged Alliance 2's adventure leaves out.