Banners & Bastions

💡 Inspiration

Banners & Bastions is a continuation of Not Suspicious' exploration of tabletop Mixed Reality. Like Airspace Defender, which released in 2024, Banners & Bastions delivers a fun and snackable tabletop experience with intuitive hand-tracking interactions. Inspirations include Airspace Defender, Kingdom Rush, Bad North, and others.

🚧 How we built it

The entire project was built in Unity using OpenXR, over the course of 330 days in 2025. The 1.0 update was built during the hackathon period, between November 5th and December 1st.

✨ What's new?

Following October's addition of controller support and November's content expansion update that introduced a new dragon boss battle and more foes, the 1.0 update going live on December 15 adds 3 new hero units with unique special abilities, a new bestiary, an autumn battlefield biome, and more.

🚀 What's next for Banners & Bastions

Localization into multiple languages
Porting to other platforms
New features if the Full Release is a success and/or funding is secured ;)

💬 Player Reactions

"Even my son, who has historically hated hand tracking because it used to be very finicky, found Banners & Bastions' hand tracking to be super effective." – Nicholas Sutrich @ Android Central

"Not Suspicious is building a track record here of developing mixed reality games with smart design that embrace the idea that a good game in a headset doesn't necessarily need to take over your whole environment to work. Banners & Bastions' visuals are clean, the controls are intuitive, and the gameplay is satisfying, all set inside a well-structured package." – Don Hopper @ UploadVR

"5 minutes in, you'll know what's going on. 15 minutes in, you'll be explaining it to your friends. Placing units, casting spells, and panning the map feels so natural you'll forget you're even controlling anything at all. It just works. This one is a definite 100% recommended purchase for me, and I just can't wait for more." – Tony Carter @ VR Reviews

"As someone who usually plays action games, I'd consider this the surprise hit of the year, as it came out of nowhere yet is one of the most fun games I've played in months. Regardless of what genre you're usually into, I can easily recommend Banners & Bastions. It's very easy to learn and understand, but hard to master. You can easily sink hours into this game." – @Verociity on YouTube

"This is easily my favorite hand-tracking experience and arcade minigame experience since I've started playing VR. The gameplay is great. The hand controls are great. The animation and art is awesome. The music's awesome. The upgrade tree is all interesting. The difficulty seems fair. This is 2 games in a row from this developer that I have enjoyed. Superb!" – @aFriendlyPest on YouTube

"I generally just love this game. It's a chill, fun game to play in whatever downtime you have.... It's just like little bite-sized sessions you can play. It's kind of just the perfect game for mixed reality hand-tracking. I highly recommend it. These games are amazing. Keep at it Not Suspicious! I love what you guys are doing!" – @JJBonta on YouTube