Playing A Game Pyre PC

I'm on record - back in 2022 - calling Transistor "like ... a proof-of-concept for Hades". I can't help but describe Pyre in the same way: another step in Supergiant's journey to a land-of-the-dead roguelike, but not much of a destination on its own.

It starts, as ever, with great-looking art and great-sounding music which set a wildly imaginative scene; but like Transistor and Bastion before it, the novelty of Pyre's aesthetics fades quickly. In dialog scenes and in its highly stylized overworld "map," as characters describe their flat personalities in terse lines, and as flavor text dumps buzzword-filled irrelvant lore babble, Pyre comes off as a shallow visual novel. The surface-level style has very little narrative substance beneath it.

I have to particularly critique the game's dialog-keyword-hover-detail mechanic, which tantalizingly highlights words in a dialog box that you can hover over for more background text, background which is never meaningful.

As for the gameplay inbetween those story scenes, to its credit, Pyre experiments more boldly than its predecessors -- its "rites" resemble basketball more than typical videogame combat. And, though the full set of controls is bewilderingly complex at first, it's easy enough for a beginner to run around and learn the mechanics one step at a time.

Unfortunately Pyre's rites don't evolve much strategically, as the simplest tactics of "run fast to the goal" and "attack until the field is clear" remain the best regardless of what's happening with your opponents or the playfield. (At least in my apparently-limited experience; I'll come back to that.) Since you're only able to move one of your three characters at a time - the other two will just sit and wait for an enemy to attack them - bigger plays involving teammate positions and timed passes aren't practically feasible.

Lacking motivations (or opportunities) to try different techniques, the experimental gameplay ultimately doesn't feel like a success. And as both the rites and the storytelling become fairly tedious, I wasn't compelled to keep playing past Pyre's surprise-not-ending.

The "surprise" is that, although Pyre sets up a clear sequence of events with a specific end-point - and its between-rite progression choices seem like a foundation for multiple "runs" through that sequence - a late narrative twist reveals that the final rite doesn't complete OR reset the campaign. Instead of freeing you and the party from your exile in Pyre's world, one party member is freed, and the "real" campaign becomes the completion of yet more rites! to free more characters, one at a time.

It vividly reminds me of Final Fantasy IV's narrative bait-and-switch around collecting the all-powerful magic crystals, then discovering there are more crystals, then still more crystals after that. A frustrating memory that I'm now recalling Bastion had dug up, too.

So yeah, I stopped playing Pyre after the "final" rite turned out to be a fraction of the way through its story. I may not have seen everything in Pyre, but I feel like I saw enough to imagine the rest, and I just wasn't interested enough to keep going.

Better than: Bastion
Not as good as: Transistor
Again, as a story which requires loop-like repetition toward an out-of-loop story: I keep thinking that Hades is the game they'd wanted to make all along.

Progress: Liberated one exile.

Rating: Meh