14 DAY TRIAL // I wonder if there’s a moment in the near future when video games will come with attached warnings that playing a title or another could directly affect our vision of the world and get us on the brink of depression.
The Banner Saga is a prime candidate for such a message because the Stoic Games made experience is filled with some serious dread and basically tempts the player to care just so that it can then hit him with yet another sad moment.
I cared about the characters more than I did for anyone in Beyond: Two Souls or The Last of Us, two games that launched in 2013 and were supposed to generate emotion among players.
The Varl, giant and horned, but built more for meditation than killing, are perfectly tuned to act as mirrors of the humans, which are brash and tend to underestimate enemy threats.
The player does make choices in The Banner Saga, but the big events are not under his control and they are perfectly used to deliver bleak, dark moments that somehow still feel a little hopeful.
But the most efficient mechanics in the entire game is the counter for days that sits at the top of the screen when the caravan is travelling.
The number ticks away, inexorably, while the figures for morale and supplies tend to always go down.
This progressions shows that despite the fighting, despite the glimmers of hope that appear, The Banner Saga is a game about how men and Varl stand in the face of almost impossible odds, ready to give everything they have just to live another day.
Video games rarely focus on the darker aspects of the human experience and even when war is the main theme, victory and hope are the emotions that developers tend of emphasize.
The Banner Saga understands the power of loss and made me care about the narrative via simple mechanics.