“As Mercy guides our hand, we spare your lives, but rid ourselves of you.”
--from the Sentencing Ceremony


Judgement: GOTY

TL; DR
Pyre is the best thing to come out of Supergiant Games’ door, and the best game to come out in 2017. Seriously, its phenomenal. It’s also an acquired taste. The main section of gameplay, the basketball like fights for freedom called Rites, are these weird bits of gameplay that quite a few people took issue with, and understandably so. For a while I thought they were difficult to control, poorly balanced, and sometimes just felt like a hinderance to the story’s progression, but after a while I warmed up to them. I don’t have anything concrete gameplay wise for this, but more on the story side. To me, the Rites are your way of becoming part of the narrative. Player agency in Pyre is off the charts, and the way that the game rolls with your performance really ties you into the world in a tangible way. Save-scumming and generally trying to fight the game to get the “best ending” will only ruin the experience. Pyre shines brightest when you suffer a terrible defeat, or pull a daring victory that you thought impossible five minutes before. Watching the games story twist under your influence and getting to spend time with the lovable members of the Nightwings were the best things I did in gaming this year, even considering the amazing sense of wanderlust I experienced with BotW.

Pyre is my game of the year for much the same reason that I loved Doki Doki Literature Club. It’s unique, a bit strange, and a benefit to the medium. So many games, Visual Novels especially, have this problem where they really don’t need to be a video game, and could perform fine as an Anime or TV show. Pyre is an absolute exception to this idea. It’s defining trait, outside of its phenomenal visuals, writing, and music, is its willingness to let the player matter. You define what happens next, not by endless dialogue options, but by trying your best in the face of overwhelming challenge. By daring to live up to the legacy of the Eight-Scribes, and to Return in Glory, if you find yourself able.


Soundtrack: Oh God Yes Please
Link: On Steam, or Bandcamp[supergiantgames.bandcamp.com]
Now I’m no stranger to hyperbole, but know that I’m not trying to exaggerate when I say this: Pyre has the best game OST I have ever heard. This is taking into account Supergiant’s phenomenal soundtracks to both Bastion and Transistor. Pyre’s soundtrack is beyond amazing. Darren Korb and Ashley Barrett just keep doing this, making the best soundtrack in a game ever, and then next time around they just get even better. Bastion’s music was phenomenal, Transistor’s was groundbreaking, and Pyre is just indescribably amazing and diverse. It really gets room to explore different styles with themes matching each group you face in the rights, making the soundtrack a wonderfully full-bodied album, with songs ranging from somber lute pieces to heavy metal, and never missing a stride in-between. It’s effortlessly stylish, and just ♥♥♥♥♥♥ great.

The music is astounding, and made even better by hearing it organically, so take my word for it, and don’t listen to any of it until you play the game. If you, the casual Reader, are still unconvinced, give just this song a gander, then get your wallet out stat.

https://youtu.be/tQhbktFT7HI

This is one of the early Rite songs, so listening to it early shouldn’t spoil much of the fun. Still, I absolutely recommend just playing the game before listening.

And def buy the soundtrack. Get the bundle, buy it on Bandcamp, I don’t care, just give these people money for this. Seriously. This is the kind of quality product that deserves to be financially supported. Supergiant Games is only around 12 people, and they’re making some of the best games and music the industry has ever seen.



Extra Comments
Alright, for the rest of this, let’s just jump into my ramble that I so dearly love to do:
Now’s probably the best time to mention that there are no explicit fail states in Pyre. When you lose in a battle, the game moves forward, and the standings on the Religious Basketball Extravaganza leaderboard get updated to match the outcome of any given match. By the time you get to Liberation Rites (fights to free a member from exile) the game really shows that it means that. If you lose a Liberation Rite the opposition gets to send someone free instead of you, creating real ramifications for your performance. It’s a flexible narrative done right, twisting not by direct dialogue choices, but instead bending based on your actual contribution to the team.

This flexibility works best when your objective isn’t to “get the best ending”. My first playthrough, my main goal was to play the game perfectly, and not fail any of the Rites. Because of this, I restarted a few Rites, and generally fought the game for control, not wanting to increase the difficulty for fear of failure. By the end of my first playthrough, I realized that wasn’t really the point of the whole experience, and my method was honestly a disservice to what Supergiant intended.

Pyre is first and foremost a story, and it’s one that you have a place in. Your skill at the game and your willingness to take risks, directly factor into your place within the narrative. The game shines brightest when you’re challenging a triumvirate better than you, facing an actual challenge, where the outcome could go either way. Most other games, screwing up means you restart, and your agency as a player has no tangible impact on the narrative. In Pyre, screwing up can cost a person their freedom, permanently. The only Rite I fumbled in my first playthrough was halfway through the game, and the defeat was staggering. My favorite character was denied their freedom by my lack of skill, and that impact made me feel like an integral part of the story in a way that I haven’t seen before.

People like to tout games where “everything you do matters!” like the QTE’s in Telltale games are going to make anything different by screwing up and dying. Quantic Dream games and Until Dawn get closer to this promise, but there’s still plenty of decisions in those that don’t matter at all.

Pyre is the closest I’ve seen someone come to fulfilling that promise. Since each Rite has a tangible impact on the games narrative, all the prep work you put in before a Rite has an impact on the story, in a once removed kind of way. Even small incremental stat bonuses and the upgrades you give members of the Nightwings have an impact on the story of Pyre, since they can be the things that sway a Rite in your favor. Similarly, the choice of Titan Stars (Pyre’s organic difficulty system) you activate for any given Rite levies the same impact. This level of consequence for your actions really helps to immerse you in the game world, and goes to show that immersion isn’t about graphics or endless sandboxes, its about making the player feel like part of the world.


Closing Thoughts
I’ll be honest, I had very low expectations for Pyre. I didn’t pre-order it like I did Transistor, as the whole Rites aspect scared me off. I’ve never liked sports games, so seeing Supergiant tackle a genre I hate had me concerned that the final product wouldn’t be up to snuff. At the end of the day, I’ve never been so wrong about a game. Supergiant has made a customer for life of me, and the fact that they’ve gone 3 for 3 on their releases is something everyone should be taking notice of.

In summary, I love this game, and the aspect of player agency is really what sells it for me. The fact that the player has so much sway over the game helps to elevate it above near everything else I played in the last 12 months. The world needs more games like Pyre, and more devs like Supergiant.


They follow the stars, Bound Together.