Grade: A+
Epic fantasy RPG with a sprinkle of sports.
Pyre is a challenging game to wrap your head around. At its heart, Pyre introduces you to a complex and multi-faceted fantasy world and culture. You take part in a character-driven story and build close-knit relationships with each cast member. Throughout the hours of gameplay, you will drink in gorgeous art, listen to enchanting music, absorb in-depth world lore, and travel far and wide through the Downside on an epic fantasy road trip. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, and if you have any soft spot in your heart, you’ll deeply connect with many of these characters and their stories.
Supergiant Games, the famous indie studio behind Bastion, Transistor, and Hades, released Pyre as their third game in 2017. It’s an utterly unique and valuable contribution to anyone’s gaming collection.
Explore a hidden world through the power of The Reader.
Cast out from the Commonwealth for the high crime of reading the written word; you play the role of “The Reader.” You are now an exile, thrown downriver into the Downside, a land with no exit. At the brink of death, The Reader has been picked up and nursed to health by your new traveling companions in a strange wagon.
We soon find out that The Reader has a talent for learning and interpreting the rules behind “The Rites,” a ceremonial competition that happens only at particular nexus locations when/where the stars align. Your role is to coach and support your traveling companions as they travel and help them win each match.
Pyre is as much a visual novel as it is a game. 70% of the game is reading, interacting, and exploring the world. 30% is gameplay. If that’s not what you’re looking for, best not pick it up. Expectations are important. You play the reader, after all, so be ready to read!
Sports game is a weird yet fitting description for the gameplay
The story, characters, art, and music are the main attractions in Pyre, but driving the gameplay is “The Rites.” While I’m reluctant to make this comparison, as it slightly cheapens the high fantasy narrative, there’s no better metaphor than calling “The Rites” a sporting event.
Naturally, the inevitable next question: “What’s a sporting event doing in an epic fantasy adventure?!” There are volumes of lore around this topic, as the Rites are a central pillar of the game. The Eight Scribes, each from a different race of people, came together to defeat massive titan monsters that roamed the land in the Downside. After making the Downside more survivable, the scribes created a process by which exiles could free themselves and return to the Commonwealth.
The Liberation Rite
The Liberation Rite is a championship match that happens at the end of a Rites season. The winner of this match is free from exile. Exiles are then welcomed back to the Commonwealth with open arms and return as celebrated members of society. Leadership positions are offered to the returning exiles, and all crimes are forgiven.
The Liberation Rite provides the main narrative oomph and momentum in both the narrative and the gameplay. You have to be prepared to let go of some of these characters you’ve grown attached to on your road trip. Not only does this impact the overall story, but it’s challenging when your best player becomes a free agent and moves on. No one wants to see their team’s Lebron James go, and the absence of critical players forces you out of comfortable strategies. It makes you constantly evolve how you approach the next season of competition.
But, how do I perform these “Rites”?
Performing The Rites is a complex dance with infinite possibilities. Your overall goal is to extinguish the Pyre of the opposing team before they extinguish yours. The gameplay centers on balancing offensive and defensive strategies and quick reflexes to beat out the competition.
I pulled out the tutorial from the game so you can get the gist of how the Rites work. I could write a thousand words and still not explain effectively, so here’s the game described by the true experts (the developers). Notice the epic voice in the background (played by Logan Cunningham) and the religious, sacred explanations. That’s all world-building!
You’ll likely need to tweak the difficulty
The default difficulty in the campaign will likely be on the easy side for many players. There’s a lot you can do to make it more challenging, though. First, you can choose a “heightened” difficulty setting, which adds better reaction time and strategies to the competitor’s AI. Second, there are titan stars that add handicaps to your team or advantages to the competition. The heightened difficulty setting was plenty challenging for me, and I stuck with that level of difficulty without a bunch of extra titan stars activated.
There’s also optimizing you can do for each character, including upgrade path choices as characters level up and gain experience. In addition, you can buy or find trinkets that give you special abilities in the Rites. Lastly, each race of creatures has it’s own strengths/weaknesses, making for an exciting mix/match of offensive and defensive capabilities.
A story that will stay with you for a long time
The story of Pyre can be broken into three main acts.
First, you have your introductory road trip where you travel through each location in the Downside, learning about this world and deepening your relationships with the characters. You meet an entire cast in this first initial sojourn across the land.
After this first road trip, you gain the ability to travel faster and move through the Downside with more ease. These next few Rite’s seasons are where the competition gets intense and focused. It’s also where you start to learn more about all of the other triumvirates you are competing against and fill up your wagon with trinkets of places you’ve visited.
Lastly, you have entropy and the endgame. The story is picking up pace, and spoilers aside, there is a surge of urgent action to complete your work before the final pieces click into place. Each individual in the vast cast of characters is impacted by the actions you embark upon and the choices you make.
A railroad of an RPG, but it’s train tracks you’ll never want to leave.
The Pyre story itself has a suite of twists, turns, and choices you make, but there’s a certain railroad element to the adventure. The tracks have been laid, and it’s your job to walk along with them. Pyre tells such a bold tale and it is so perfectly crafted in its delivery that I didn’t want to veer off the path laid before me. I was invested.
So invested, in fact, that I wanted to get better at “the Rites” in order to do right by my compatriots. I practiced and worked out the kinks in my game, played around with combos of players and abilities. Losing a match in the campaign is a gut punch because you feel like everyone in the team is relying on you and you don’t want to let them down.
When you hit against the inevitable loss, it’s hard to resist the urge to reload the match and try again. I strongly recommend playing through without reloading, though, as the game’s dialogue and story have a lot more depth when a few significant Rites losses are sprinkled in.
Lore is a worthwhile investment
It’s a rare world that will catch my interest to the point where I can name the pantheon, the stars, the sites, the characters, races, and lore from memory. To keep it all organized, you keep it all in your book. It’s bound in astral leather, of course, and you unlock pages as you gain an understanding of its contents.
When I got to the end of Pyre’s tale, the emotional payoff was entirely worth all the effort in learning the world lore. Only a couple of other times can I remember being as impacted by a game as I was by Pyre.
Music and Art is the glue that elevates the whole
While the narrative is wonderfully written and the sports gameplay is exciting, the art and music are the glue that holds the whole thing together. It’s hard to know where to start, so I’ll begin right at the end. In the end credits, you pan up across each character and get a song verse for each one.
They ended up cutting the verses together programmatically based on the story outcome for each character. They pan across the character’s portraits drawn as constellations against the backdrop of the stars. The song, written by Darren Korb, is a haunting and beautiful melody that highlights each of the dramatic personae you’ve fallen in love with throughout the adventure. It’s a perfect ending to the game.
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