The Banner Saga
Fair · RPG · 2014
Steam Deck VerifiedThe verdict
NO RUSH.
Fair at $24.99. Buy it if you want it.
- Length
- 10.7h
- Value
- $2.34/hr
- Reviews
- 89% positive
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Minimum on the Steam store: 2 GB of memory, 4 GB of storage. Runs on Windows, macOS.
Live through an epic role-playing Viking saga where your strategic choices directly affect your personal journey. Make allies as you travel with your caravan across this stunning yet harsh landscape. Carefully choose those who will help fight a new threat that jeopardizes an entire civilization.
What drives the score
How to read this
Every input gets a grade, S to D, read from the buyer's side. The score is multiplicative, so an input only counts as raising when it sits near the top of its own scale. Anything with real room left is holding the score back, because that room is the gap to 100. ▲ marks a lift, ▼ a drag or a dock, ? an input we do not have, • a fact this genre's score does not use. The exact weights stay secret.
The value story
February 2021 is where it bottomed out, at $1.59. Its cuts run 80 percent off as a rule. There have been 76 in the 13 years tracked, about 7 weeks apart. Today it is at full price. The last sale was about 13 weeks ago, and on this game's rhythm the next one tends to arrive within 7 weeks.
On value it sits in the top 6 percent of its genre. It is pricier than 93 percent of its genre, and better reviewed than 92 percent. Among the games that feel like it, The Banner Saga 2 ($24.99, scores 65) beats it on value, while it beats Popup Dungeon ($24.99, scores 35).
Critics scored it 80. Players sit 9 points higher at 89 percent, which usually means a game that plays better than it reviews.
Steam's global achievement data says about 19 percent of players ever finish it. On a 10.7-hour game, that is a lot of paid-for hours most people never see. Of the 800 Steam-purchase reviews this site sampled, 1 comes from a buyer who refunded the game, sampled from reviews written April 2020 to September 2026. Inside the two-hour refund window, 63 percent of the 656 reviews written there were positive, against 89 percent overall, and those are 5 percent of everything written about it.
10.7 hours to finish it, 30 to exhaust it. The completionist tail is 2.8 times the campaign.
Valve rates it Steam Deck Verified, and at 10.7 hours it is short enough to finish on one.
The drop-off
91% start to 19% finishA normal fall-off for a game this long. Steam global achievements
Players
24 players at peak in the last day.
The chart appears once this game has been counted more than once.Player counts via SteamSpy.
What players say
Goated game don't listen to the haters. incredible story and atmosphere with engaging gameplay.
Player reviews from Steam: the most helpful all-time, plus the newest that clear the same quality bar, with the hours each player had put in when they wrote it. The mix of Recommended and Not recommended follows the game's Steam ratio. Rotates daily. Opinions are theirs.
Cite this score
Embed the live badge, copy the line, or download the card.
The Banner Saga scores 63/100 on the BANG Score (fair value). The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/237990/the-banner-sagaThe BANG Score is one number for value, 0 to 100: price against how it reviews and how long it was built to be. It answers the money question and stops there; whether the game is for you is still your call.
Reviews set the ceiling and price moves you inside it, so a cheap game that reviews badly cannot climb. Ratings from few reviewers are shrunk toward the middle, so 100 percent from nine people does not outrank 96 percent from ninety thousand. Length comes from HowLongToBeat where it can be matched, measured against a per-genre floor so a five-hour narrative game is judged against other narrative games rather than against a sixty-hour RPG. Where no verified length exists the score says so and carries a dock, because the biggest input is then a guess. The full method, including where it is weak → Steam reviews as of Sep 16, price as of Sep 24.
A number here look wrong? Tell me what it got wrong and I will look at the inputs behind it.