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The Banner Saga
The Banner Saga blends tactical battles with a journey shaped by consequential choices that can cost you characters. At ≈ $9.74 from 
Kinguin, weigh the offer against your appetite for a serious single-player saga; Steam player reviews are 88% positive from 13,487 reviews. English interface and subtitles are available, along with full controller support. Compare ≈ $9.74 at Kinguin with $24.99 on Steam; ≈ $15.25 is the amount saved versus Steam.
All-time low ~ $1.59across Steam & third-party stores
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Price History
Past 36 months · Updated dailyHistorical Low~ $3.742025-12Current Low Across Stores~ $24.99Steamvs. Historical Low+568%
Prices cover Steam and 39 authorized stores; only legitimate offers are counted. The chart shows weekly market-wide lows and Steam's official price across the past 36 months.
DLC
01About The Banner Saga
In The Banner Saga, lead a caravan across a harsh frozen world where strategic choices shape both the journey and the story. Assemble a party of distinct characters, manage the caravan, and choose your fighters carefully: victories, defeats, and decisions afterward can have lasting consequences. Steam player reviews: 88% positive from 13,487 reviews. The interface is available in English. Full audio is available in English.
Credits
Composer
Austin Wintory
Developer
Stoic
Publisher
Stoic Studio
Lowest recorded in 36 months
$3.742025-12-18 · SteamBase game · same records as the chart above; USD history, not a regional Steam low.Language support
| Language | Interface | Subtitles | Audio |
|---|---|---|---|
| Simplified Chinese | Yes | Yes | — |
| English | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| French | Yes | Yes | — |
Show 9 more languages
| Language | Interface | Subtitles | Audio |
|---|---|---|---|
| German | Yes | Yes | — |
| Spanish | Yes | Yes | — |
| Polish | Yes | Yes | — |
| Portuguese-Brazil | Yes | Yes | — |
| Russian | Yes | Yes | — |
| Italian | Yes | Yes | — |
| Japanese | Yes | Yes | — |
| Korean | Yes | Yes | — |
| Czech | Yes | Yes | — |
Steam PC edition data · 2026-10-20
02Before you buy
Mode and controls
The Steam PC version is single-player and has full controller support.
Language
The interface and subtitles support English, among other languages. Full audio is available in English.
03Frequently asked questions
Do choices affect the story?
Yes. Choices during travel, conversations and combat affect how the story unfolds.
Can characters be lost permanently?
Yes. Characters can be permanently lost in combat, and defeat can have consequences too.
What happens between battles?
You build and manage the caravan as it travels across a frozen landscape.
Popular Steam reviews
Native-language selection · 10 reviewsSelected helpful reviews in this language show both recommendations and criticisms. This selection does not represent the overall positive rating; opinions reflect the version reviewed.
RecommendedSteam player
The Banner Saga Review: http://youtu.be/yEZttPytzF0 Check out my full video review, In all a fantastic game. Great story telling combined with a rich art, solid combat and unique management features. Thanks for watching CosmicShow moreShow less
7.6 hours at review817 people found this helpful
Not recommendedSteam player
It really pains me to do this because there are so many reasons to like this game. The problem is that The Banner Saga simply doesn't deliver what it promises. At the very beginning we are informed that at our decisions affect the game: THEY DON'T. Despite the fact that they've created this vast and gorgeous world, steeped in lore and history, you can't even choose where to go. You're firmly 'on-the-rails' for the entire game. Occasionally, you get text based encounters where you get to make a decision, but having played Banner Saga a couple of times, I can tell you that most of these change nothing. Sometimes one character or another dies, but it's trivial since they aren't really necessary anyway. At the very beginning we are treated to a beautiful animated cut-scene complete with voice acted dialogue, so you'd figure those would come up at key points in the game at least, right? THEY DON'T. Not even at the end. As the story develops, more and more layers are revealed: The gods are dead; the sun has stopped in the sky; there's a prophecy; there's tension and intrigue between characters and races, etc, etc. NONE OF IT GOES ANYWHERE. In a nut shell, the story is: survive until you get to the end boss - who has practically nothing to do with anything. The artwork is gorgeous, the concept (Viking Oregon Trail + Turn Based Strategy + Some RPG elements) is simple but it works. But instead of using that simplicity to really open up the world, we're instead treated to a vast tableaux of untapped potential. Maybe they're planning a sequel - and heck, I've put this many hours in already, I might even pick it up - but honestly, if a game leaves you feeling, "What, that's it?" It failed to deliver. EDIT: I DO NOT care that Banner Saga is part of a planned trilogy. I WILL NOT base a review of a game on the potential of its sequel. I think that would be a huge disservice to those choosing whether or not to spend money on THIS game.Show moreShow less
32.9 hours at review1,571 people found this helpful
RecommendedSteam player
Despite always handing players a crummy hand, the consistent drawbacks in The Banner Saga are exhilarating, even if they are utterly exhausting as well. While a sporadic bout of good news may flow through the caravan, the tone is clear. It’s an arduous journey and one that will come with death at all times. With an authentically illustrated ambience of harsh winters and closely followed characters, its story seen through tough conversations becomes that much more captivating. Offering simple yet fully symbiotic combat options as an active counterpart to text, this game leaves little to be desired, except the will to survive. Read the full review: http://www.noobfeed.com/reviews/995/the-banner-sagaShow moreShow less
19.1 hours at review431 people found this helpful
Not recommendedSteam player
There are two things you need to know about the gameplay before considering buying this game, things that caused me to request a refund after I realized them. Firstly, the strategic layer involves you being forced to constantly make "choices" that you can't possibly predict the outcome of, whose outcomes regularly entail killing off major characters. For instance, in one early game choice, you can either take a person with you to a potentially dangerous area, or leave a person behind (again, in a potentially dangerous area) and you have no way of knowing which one will kill them off before it happens. In the interests of not spoiling any more of them, it's basically "pick a direction to go in", where half the time "left" murders somebody and right is safe, and the other half of the time "right" murders somebody and left is safe. Or worse, both left and right murder somebody, it's just a different person each time (and again, you have no way of knowing which one). This is a gameplay mechanic that's present in a lot of rogue-lites, and the simple solution is to just look up the answers if you're not a masochist who likes getting punished for simply playing the game. Unlike many rogue-lites, though, the choices are tied in heavily to the linear narrative and are all the same every playthrough, and these choices are a major part of the story, so looking up the answers is basically ruining the plot for you. It's a catch 22: either the game ruins its story by making it a bad experience, or you ruin the story by trying to make it a less bad experience. If the strategic layer being a masochistic nightmare wasn't enough, there's also the tactical layer which has one of the stupidest mechanics I've ever seen. Well, three of them, which in isolation would probably be perfectly fine but together end up creating something truly stupid. First: the damage you can deal is directly proportional to your HP. Second: turns alternate back and forth between enemy and ally. Third: you only get XP from kills. So what happens when you combine these three mechanics together? Well, you're incentivized to take less people into a fight (not more), train up an extremely small number of powerful units (rather than spread XP out), and keep *enemy units* alive as long as possible. Basically the turn order means that no matter how many units you take into a fight or how many are remaining (there is one exception but its irrelevant), you have roughly the same overall turn economy: you get one attack for every one the enemy gets. So if you have 4 people in a fight (ABCD) and the enemies have two (XY), turns go AXBYCXDY - that is, every enemy gets two turns for every one turn your ally gets. Combined with the HP = Damage mechanic, this ultimately means that if 2/4 allies are at low HP, you have less combat strength than your opponent does with two healthy units. This also means that if your opponent has 2 healthy enemies and 2 low HP enemies, they are literally weaker than if they had 2 healthy enemies. Are you seeing the problem yet? Basically, your damage output is determined by your *average* damage per unit. If you had 6 characters who were all perfectly equal to each other in combat strength, then none of them would be a detriment. If just one of those 6 characters is, say, a lower level, or a weak class, or at low HP, bringing that one weakling into a fight is just going to *reduce* the damage you can deal each turn, which is also going to increase the damage you take from the now higher-HP enemies and make it more likely someone will die. If all characters were extremely well balanced and there were no levels, the turn alternation might make sense. But some characters are clearly stronger than others, and characters can have disparities in their level if they get too many kills. Similarly, If the turn alternation didn't exist, the damage = HP mechanic would be very interesting. But because average damage per person matters, you'd rather have two enemies at half health than one at full health and one dead. So let's recap: Bringing more units into a fight means you're spreading XP across a wider pool of characters, making each individual unit weaker, reducing your average strength per unit (which is synonymous with your overall strength). Units that are lower level are literally a net loss to combat strength if you try to bring them into a fight, because they use up turns that could go to stronger units. It's better to keep enemy units alive with low HP, as these units waste turns of more powerful units and give you a window of opportunity to burn down the stronger units while giving them the fewest number of turns possible. None of this stuff is intuitive and it all seems like it would lead to disastrously reductive gameplay: only take your highest level units into a fight, leave the rest of them at home at level one, focus on reducing every enemy to 1 HP before finishing them off. And pray you don't lose your elites to a dialogue option, I guess. I've only played 2 hours before I asked for a refund. Maybe once you're 10 hours in everything clicks into place and makes sense. I don't want to find out the hard way. I have no real commentary on the rest of the game. The rest of the mechanics seem fine. I don't know if the classes become really cool later on or not. I don't know if the story is becomes awesome. Maybe another review will provide a more balanced perspective. I'm just here to warn you about two boneheaded design choices that caused me to give up on the game after 2 hours. If you still want to buy the game after reading this review, go ahead and play it and let me know.Show moreShow less
2.2 hours at review415 people found this helpful
RecommendedSteam player
Just want to give my early impressions. Not a full, formal review. The Banner Saga is a Kickstarter game and it's exactly what Kickstarter should be about: visionaries with bold ideas that probably wouldn't get funded through traditional means. And that's exactly how TBS feels; it's a game designed by visionaries who love every bit of their craft but that leads to some issues of its own I'll address later. First off, this is a gorgeous game. The art style combines the clear-line character art of Ivan Bilibin with the iconic backdrops of Eyvind Earle. Every piece of art from the intricately detailed world map to the rotoscoped animations is beautifully rendered. The world of TBS draws heavy inspiration from Norse mythology but there's quite a bit of detail and world building when I was expecting it to be very straightforward. While it is still a strategy game through and through, fans of RPGs will find plenty to like with the well defined characters and detailed world. Being a strategy game, combat is at the forefront but has some niggling issues. It's a very clean move-action system where character order is more important than arbitrary stats like speed. Being wholly turn based, action economy is the name of the game as you're forced to dominate the battlefield through superior placement of your units. Combat could be a bit more robust but normal difficulty is a decent challenge so far and there's "hard" for people wanting more of a challenge. Thankfully, battles are evenly spaced between story scenes so every individual battle feels special. Unfortunately, my biggest complaint of an otherwise fine system is the speed. Combat moves at a lethargic pace. There's no option to skip animations or speed combat and in a game where battles with as few as 4 enemies can take 10-15 minutes average, having a speed-up option is sorely missed. TBS is immensely pleasurable so far and I can only hope it remains consistent to the end. I'll update my thoughts as I go along.Show moreShow less
6.2 hours at review300 people found this helpful
Not recommendedSteam player
This game causes mixed feelings. The concept had really great potential but it wasn't fulfilled. Some (+)s and (-)s (+) Art. It seems to me that graphics and music were on the minds of developers from the very beginning and they focused solely on it. Great, fantastic art. Impeccable style. Totally enjoyed it. (+) Caravan management and interactive stories. These determine the result of everything: what characters you'll get, which ones will survive and which will die, how much resourses you'll get etc. That's one of the best parts of the game. (+) Strong authentic atmosphere. (+) Excellent initial concept. (-) Weak repetitive battles and gameplay in general. Too few different types of enemies. Few classes of characters. And there are hundreds of battles when you have to fight the same enemies with the same characters. Boring to death. It seems that developers devoted themselves to making graphics so much that they forgot about gameplay till the last night before the release and barely managed to finish it hurriedly. But often gameplay = fun. (-) Story. It was intended really epic. I mean REALLY big and epic like in Game of Thrones or something. But they didn't have enough resourses, so in the end it finishes abruptly, it is relatively weak, it's not supported by great gameplay, it is disappoining. If they'd taken something of a less scale the game would have been much better I guess. My overall imression is negative which is sadly, because this game could have been truly terrific.Show moreShow less
20.8 hours at review288 people found this helpful
RecommendedSteam player
The story itself starts off with humans and varl(giants) trying to bond thier alliance when suddenly everyone getting attacked by the armies of dredge (stonelike people) and are forced to travel away to confront this diaster, as you travel the lands you'll discover friends, encounter wars, and make choices that will change the outcome of your party. You'll be playing this game from the perspective of two different caravans. What an amazing game for its value, The art in this game is fantastic, the story is also very well done and the music is phenominal you'll enjoy this game if you enjoy turn table tatic with great art, story, and music with a viking theme to the entire game. only cutscenes had voice acting and that was pretty good. The only things I thought was meh in the game was is how a unit must kill off a unit to level up otherwise he'll stay level 1 forever so you'll have to really decide who you want to level up, the limited special moves that each of the units had (which is 1) for each char, and the lack of voice acting during the events scenes but this is understandable due to the fact that its an indie title and the focus of the budget was on everything else. So hopeful for future sequels to be even better. The game itself is really hard due to the fact that you cannot heal your units in this game so you have to make your turn wisely, Your units only levels up if they get the last kill which I was meh about, but the choices you make to either level up your army, buy some items, or supplies for the travel is gutwrenching making the game really challenging, especially since choices you make can effect your entire party and army and your currency (renown) is so limited. There is many heroes to gather during your travel which you'll get to interact with at camp as you travel to learn about them. The travel itself which reminds me of oregon trail a bit, is enjoyable to watch as your little army travel the lands and the events with decisions unfold for you to decide on how your battle will be or what the outcomes will be. The map itself presents a sizeable amount of lore about the land itself and there are more to read as you travel. +Good story with good amount of lore and character interactions. +Great Art. +Music is fantastic. +much replayability due to choices you make in the game, also there is interaction with the heroes at camp. +its a 20 dollar game and have a good amount of hour in it, 10+ -wish there was voice acting during the traveling event, lots of reading and text -each char only has one skill, not everyone has a buncha skills to utilize and the leveling is really straightforward since you can only level chars up to level 5 max, would love to see expansion of this -No multiplayer of any sort in this one, singleplayer only you'll have to play THE BANNER SAGA FACTIONS for this.Show moreShow less
22 hours at review194 people found this helpful
Not recommendedSteam player
I don't think The Banner Saga is a very well executed game. The ideas are certainly there, the story is interesting, the music is excellent, but gameplay-wise, it has some pretty egregious design problems. Consider that players replaying the game regularly consult a guide to check when certain characters might die, in order to not waste resources levelling before that point. Then consider that on your first run, you don't have that - you have the option to choose from an assortment of characters, spending your points (renown) on whoever you please. But while they can die from your negligence, they generally don't: they die from purely unpredictable events instead. Well that's how surviving in a viking wasteland is, yes? That's how it should be! The trouble is that this is not FTL - a run is not 1-2 hours, it's 10, and it isn't replayable if you find yourself trapped with a now-useless team after luck decides to screw you. It's harsh, and adds to the tone of the game, but it's also ruinous. Save-scum, save-scum. Double-edged sword that may be, I can see the justification for it. What I can't justify, at all, is that the game essentially does nothing with it's random encounter system. Events pop up and you're faced with options. Based on my runthrough of the game, I'd say you get positive outcomes maybe a fifth of the time. Further adding to the harsh climate of the game, etc, etc... the trouble is, your options tend to lie in shades of grey between the -right- thing and the -wrong- thing to do in any given case... and THERE IS ZERO DIFFERENCE. They're all dice rolls, and that I started at a point of angelic service to my fellow survivors and slowly arced towards commiting horrible deeds for my tribe caused not one change. It was dice rolls all the way through; you get nothing in exchange for that guilt, and seeing what emotional impact it has on the player to decide, I'll murder this person in front of my (character's) daughter, when you take the plunge and hit that button ----> dice roll. The same dice roll. 80% of the time, it goes bad, and you feel worse. (On a lesser note, a gripe: this game totally does not have good animation, as nearly everyone is excited to share. It has a very cool art style, but central story beats aren't illustrated; they're all just text... including the climax.) I leave off with one thing. The final boss is very very poorly designed, requiring a combat style the rest of the game would punish (rushing in a straight line forward), and I didn't/couldn't finish with the team I had, and I now have no intention of continuing with this franchise. Cross your fingers. You might find the telepathy to make the right decisions, and the game might be fun! For me it was a lesson in negative reinforcement.Show moreShow less
10.6 hours at review219 people found this helpful
RecommendedSteam player
Mesmerizing & unforgettable // Recommended even at full price + Top-shelf voice-acting (what little there is, unfortunately) + Gorgeous environmental visuals; backdrops have clearly been painstakingly created + Spectacular toon-inspired animations; work well in practice, & contrast well with the somber tone of the game + Soundtrack is quite moving, & is implemented perfectly + Rich in lore; the world map is a great place to read up on different regions and their history + The need for balance of supplies outside of battle adds significant planning & depth to the meta game + When the caravan is moving, the player is confronted with myriad choices (similar to Oregon Trail), most of which are difficult; one's decisions often have large ripples that deeply affect the course of the narrative + Combat system is superb; simple & easy to learn, but rife with nuance that makes for a satisfying experience (& encourages practice & experimentation) + Competent & well-delivered narrative; dialogue is uniformly well-written + Does well to showcase adult themes & the gravity of difficult decisions + The 'War' mechanic is well-handled, & adds another layer of depth & challenge to enemy encounters; choices made here will affect the enemy strength that you encounter, as well as casualties along your entire caravan + Balance of morale & willpower, on & off the battlefield, will keep one on one's toes - Occasional, momentary drops in framerate during caravan marches LockeProposal's Big Day Out Community Group Curator Page Serious Steam Reviews subRedditShow moreShow less
75.7 hours at review190 people found this helpful
Not recommendedSteam player
Oh, Banner Saga. I supported you on Kickstarter, and I wanted so much to love you. Your visuals are gorgeous, your music excellent, and your writing sublime. But your gameplay! Ah, your gameplay leaves much to be desired. Drama aside, The Banner Saga is a game that should have been excellent, but is marred by its actual gameplay. The tactical combat is the sort that some will love and some will hate, but either way the initiative system is completely nonsensical, with units in each army getting to act more often as they become outnumbered. Damage and health are also based on the same number, so as a character takes damage, he becomes increasingly ueless in battle - which is a serious problem if you outnumber your enemies. But where the game really fails is the decisions it presents. On the surface, it looks like the system used in many games: be presented with a situation, and react. The problem is that it falls into the trap of frequently making the consequences of your choices arbitrary. Sometimes you can reasonably predict what result each choice will produce, but most of the time the results come from nowhere, making the decisions effectively meaningless. If the player can't reasonably exert control, why give him choices at all? The game has been getting a lot of good reviews, so clearly my opinion is in the minority. But I can't recommend it. Its gameplay simply holds it back too much from being a satisfying experience.Show moreShow less
3.9 hours at review212 people found this helpful
Source: original Steam user reviews. Helpful votes are an archived snapshot, not live data. Last collected: 08/15/2026.