Pyre

I'm a couple hours in and it's a pleasure. The characters and place are really well made. The gameplay is fun, and the breaks in the action are very engaging.

Wow. I love this game. Supergiant games leverage strong art direction and sound design to tell unique stories in watercolor worlds. Pyre takes everything they have learned from their previous games and practices tact in their execution. Here we have a story riddled with choices. The choices effect characters. The characters mean everything. Everything from the gameplay to the unique music tracks revolve around them. How they are presented, from the art to the sound, is as living legends. Larger than life, not a single faceless one of them. Pyre goes to great lengths to ensure you know, and want to know, all about the and their world. Any discussion of the gameplay here quickly devolves into likening it with sports, which is ultimately misleading thematically. I advise starting Pyre blind. Let it wash over you. You cannot lose in this game, so skill is mitigated. Be ready for some reading, as voice acting is limited and in a fanciful language (part of the charm). Make sure you play it with sound. Enjoy.

If you played a lot of Blitzball in Final Fantasy VIII, then you will love this game. For those who don't know what that is, the best way I would describe this game is as an RPG-version of Basketball. The goal is to try and outscore your oppentent and how you do so can depend on who you decided to send it. Smaller characters, for example, are faster but they score less points. There is a fair amount of detail that can affect your strategy for the game from how you level up characters to whether you want to chance the game's equivalant of a "Three-point shot" to even what players you can field as they may dislike each other. The story is told mostly through text and visuals, which sucks if you hate reading and loved listening to a narrator with a sexy voice tell you how good you are at kicking ass. There is a snarky anouncer but for the most part it's told in the style of a visual novel. But if you take the time to read it, you will find a world and lore that is deep and complex. And while it's mostly static, the watercolor look to the characters and environments are GORGOROUS to look at. The story revolves around you being sent into exile for the crime of being able to read and are picked up by a wandering band of fellow exiles. And now there is a chance of escape thanks to a celestial event known as "The Rites". As a reader, you are now tasked with helping the members of your team escape exile and return to civilization. That's essetially the story as most of it is told based on who you decide to spend time with and how games play out. All in all, Pyre is a really solid title to add to SuperGiant's catalouge and well worth picking up. It's different and not for everyone but I'd rather a developer try something new than sit on their laurals.

Pyre develops around landscapes, races and rules that are foreign to the new player at first, but that become nostalgia at the end of the game. The story line and the beautiful graphics conform the channel for those feelings. The game play is founded on some basic rules that allow for a deep game development. The story development has direct impact on the game play, and vice-versa. Indeed another great title from Supergiant Games!

Rare is when a game exceeds my standards for a game I am willing to finish, and then becomes a high benchmark. This game is a perfectly balanced piece of gameplay, storytelling, and immersion, I must applaud the team for creating a game that's lingered in my mind even a year since I last played it. And it has the true mark of mastery--I ended feeling fulfilled by the game but I wished for more. Pyre is a game that makes you work outside of its truly novel and breathtakingly fun battles, causing you to deal with the logic of why you make choices, ranging from where you are going next to who you are going to pick for each role. Interacting with the story and the choices makes you an active player in the game, even outside of the battles. It's also an emotional journey that offers surprising depth, all packaged up beautifully by some of the most unique and gorgeous art style that I've ever seen in a game, made all the more beutiful because it is functional and translates fully into the battles, not to ignore the well-made soundtrack and sound design, minimalist voice work that doesn't grate on my ears like other game's voice work does. It's also not to ignore the perfect character writing that doesn't pull too much attention away from the experience of the game but also doesn't provide the player with one-dimensional paper dolls to care about. The battles feel like a sport that I would love to watch if it actually existed, and each one never failed to have me on the edge of my seat, at first because I was trying to get my RPG-minded brain to wrap around an action style of gameplay and then because the stakes presented in the story had me truly dreading failure.