Or, at the very least, we are at the precipice of some other world breaking through-a world that could reveal itself as a twisted, cruel shadow of the one we grew up in, or one that is shaped by the most fearless of us still willing to work toward the good. In other words, it feels like the world is ending. The various social nets that once felt robust in American society now feel brittle, fragile under the weight they are forced to carry without adequate support.

Progressive social movements are met with dismissal from the representatives meant to champion them at the federal level. Political leaders bicker over how much to cut taxes as our children starve and struggle in overcrowded classrooms. The sea is warming, the ice caps slowly melting into the ocean. Outside of the game, in our world, global warming is approaching catastrophic levels. It is, then, an extremely familiar-feeling game. It’s a precarious position above all-while everyone is in agreement that the world will not ever be what it once was, no one quite knows the best way forward. In many ways, it is a game set within an apocalypse. This complicates the binary idea of pre-apocalypse and post-apocalypse: the game explores both areas already touched by the darkness, and those that are holding out. The games all focus on the moments before and during the end, where the people who inhabit the land know the land is dying. The Banner Saga isn’t set quite there, yet. The apocalypse becomes a flashpoint between two wildly different eras. Apocalyptic stories offer, above all else, a changing-point, a time where what is becomes what was, and what was is changed beyond retrieval. It’s the same dark romance that lures people toward stories of destruction, train-wrecks, widespread calamity and other disasters. The Banner Saga physicalizes the end, a creeping alien darkness spreading over the land, leaving twisted remnants of whatever was before in its wake.Īpocalypticism can be romantic. In the world of The Banner Saga the end of the world is a point of no return on the horizon, invading faster every day. Not “gone” as in physically gone, but “gone” as in irrevocably changed. It’s a sobering moment for an entire universe, knowing that-barring some unforeseen massive upheaval-everything and anything that constitutes the known reality will be gone. The Banner Saga games have always been about the way people approach the end of the world.

The banner saga length