Watching Pyre’s emotionally gripping story unfold, precisely and enjoyably punctuated by exciting, tactical, real-time battles, is to witness just about everything I look for in a video game executed all but flawlessly. Developer Supergiant’s latest is an experience on par with watching a world-class musician perform a difficult piece with equal parts talent and soul. And speaking of which, the music is superb.
The intricate but easy to follow story casts you as the Reader, an unseen character flung into the center of momentous events that are shaking the foundations of a finely crafted fantasy setting best described as some kind of beautiful cross between Dr. Seuss and H.P. Lovecraft. Like Bastion and Transistor, it’s an imaginary world where the dark and the whimsical mingle like they’ve always belonged together, subverting familiar stereotypes and treating lore nerds to layers and layers of detailed, expertly penned history and legend to uncover.
Your task is to put together a kind of mystical sports team to compete in an arcane ritual called The Trials, which are the only way for criminals exiled to a bleak frontier called the Downside to earn a pardon and return to the shining Commonwealth from whence they came. Interactions with the diverse, lovable, many-layered party members and the constellation of memorable opponents and side characters who surround them take place in a delightfully hand-drawn overworld that you navigate via something approaching a visual novel, similar to the style of the campaign of a Fire Emblem game. Choices you make here will uncover elements of your comrades’ pasts, steer your journey down branching courses with meaningful consequences, and ultimately decide both the course of the world above and the one below.
Branching storylines have become common in games, but it’s rare that one integrates momentous, gut-wrenching choices with the other elements of its gameplay as deftly as Pyre does. It’s hard to explain exactly what I mean without spoiling some large parts of the story, but I’ll share an example of how a choice I knew I would one day have to make became the emotional heart of the experience for me – even more so than the main plot.
Rukey Greentail is one of your first companions and quickly became my star orb-runner in The Trials, with his speed and agility forming the cornerstone of my playstyle. The strategies I’d developed all had him at their center. He was my secret weapon. But by chance, while following an optional objective on our travels I overheard Rukey praying to the stars for something he really wanted in his heart of hearts. Something I felt like I would be a monster to deny him. The catch? Granting him his wish would remove him from my roster forever. I struggled with the decision mightily through many Trials, and of all the earthshaking choices I made throughout the last act, the one that left the greatest emotional impression on me had to do with Rukey’s wish.
It’s so masterfully plotted, setting up situations where gameplay considerations must constantly be weighed against tugs at my own heartstrings. And the number of ways each character’s story can go had my head spinning with the possible paths I could follow in my next playthrough. Between all of the fates I could choose for certain characters over Pyre’s 20 hours and a Mass Effect 3-style progress tracker that determines how well your ultimate plan is enacted, the number of possible endings seems expansive.
If the outstanding choice-focused visual novel portion was all Pyre had to offer and conflicts were resolved with simple dice rolls, it would probably still be an amazing game. But instead, we get The Trials: a hectic, highly tactical, real-time battle system that feels more than a little like a fantasy world version of NBA Jam in which the object is to have one of your three characters run or throw an orb into the enemy pyre until their points are depleted. It’s sort of like a combination between football and basketball where the ball carrier is vulnerable to “banishment” – being removed from the match for a short period of time – by coming into contact with an enemy player’s aura (which varies in size based on their stats) or being hit by a special attack. The trick is that while there are three characters on a team, you’re only able to move one at a time. This gives rise to a whole range of tactics based on positioning your inactive teammates to passively defend your pyre by obstructing the other team.
There’s no lack of diversity, visually or mechanically, when it comes to the playing fields. Some have moving obstacles or blocks that can be pushed around to create a makeshift defensive perimeter. Others feature chasms that must be jumped, flown, or teleported across. One even pits you against living mobs that move around semi-randomly to make it difficult to plan your plays with any kind of certainty. Strategies and players that seem useless on a flat field can rise to all-star status depending on the terrain, making knowing when to use them crucial. And each arena has a unique visual personality, from the volcanic, imposing Nest of Triesta to the angelic and stately Fall of Soliam where the campaign’s ultimate challenges, the Liberation Rites, take place.
THE VERDICT
From the art to the music to the story to the tactical gameplay, and even to how they’re all woven together so artfully, Pyre is an adventure that excels in every area of its design other than limiting its multiplayer to local only. It’s an epic journey that made me feel thrilled, devastated, and awed, and its tense moments had me tugging my collar both in and out of its fast-paced mystical sports arenas. With an emotionally charged ending that saw so much I’d striven for come to fruition, but was still tinged with tragedy and melancholy even when I did almost everything right, I won’t be able to get Pyre out of my head for a long time. This is Supergiant’s best work to date, and that’s saying something.