The Art of Banner Saga
Banner Saga is a terrific game. The story is the best contemporary evocation of the grim, stoic Viking embrace of doom and wyrd. It’s a variation on the too-timely theme of Ragnarok, the battle which will come at the end of everything, and which we shall all lose.
The gameplay is smart and tactical and fittingly tough.
But what sets this game apart is its amazing art work. The world conveyed – like the world of the Viking sagas – is flat and stylized. Landscapes arrange themselves in delicate, jagged edges and intricate patternings, like water atoms arranging themselves into ice-crystals.
This cold, beautiful style is inextricable from the play and the worldview of the game. As in a Viking saga, it’s a two-dimensional world that proceeds in a single direction. Like a narrative woven into a tapestry – or a banner.
The gameplay is smart and tactical and fittingly tough.
But what sets this game apart is its amazing art work. The world conveyed – like the world of the Viking sagas – is flat and stylized. Landscapes arrange themselves in delicate, jagged edges and intricate patternings, like water atoms arranging themselves into ice-crystals.
This cold, beautiful style is inextricable from the play and the worldview of the game. As in a Viking saga, it’s a two-dimensional world that proceeds in a single direction. Like a narrative woven into a tapestry – or a banner.
The artists of Banner Saga have indicated their debt to the mid-century American artist Eyvind Earle (sometime hired brush for Disney worlds, as in Sleeping Beauty). I’m pleased with the influence, linking as it does my homelandscape of California hills and coastlines with the worlds of the frozen North.