The removal of weapons management as a way of creating variety obscured the fact that this is yet another mechanic Pyre adapts from earlier games, just in a different form. On a replay there are many ways to make it harder, but if you like the basketball-like combat the first time you do it, chances are you’ll like it the twentieth if not, the same is true. The combat of Pyre is contained in a series of challenges called the Rites, where three-person teams compete to plunge an orb into their opponent’s goal and prevent the same from happening to them. The sports game you play at the beginning is the sports game you’re playing at the end. Both were more straightforward story-focused games with experience trees that created diverging playstyles, meaning that your gameplay experience could be novel each time you played. It was fantasy sportsball, a left-field choice for a studio whose previous work had been a pastoral action RPG and a cyberpunk thriller. At the time, this was the major gripe with Pyre, and one of the reasons that despite its high review scores, it doesn’t have the same untouchable status as Supergiant’s previous two games, which-to me-don’t feel nearly as good to play now. It’s more extensive than the rolling narration of previous games and, when alternated with Pyre’s fast-paced but carefully interstitial combat, just as digestible.īut despite these refinements of past games’ mechanics, Pyre is remembered primarily as the time Supergiant did a sports game. Most of the exposition comes from character dialogue that’s hyperlinked to expose you to even more of the history of the world, a form of purgatory called the Downside where teams of players compete to reach salvation and rejoin the world they were banished from.
The studio’s focus on story is present here, too, although Pyre is much more text-heavy than previous games, and that makes it a little slower. In fact, Pyre cemented it: do something twice and it’s a trend, but three times and it’s a calling card.
Its central gameplay mechanic-basketball, if basketball became a way of escaping purgatory-was viewed as a radical departure from the structure of preceding games, which each included a customizable suite of weapons, upgrades, and challenges that allowed for wildly different gameplay experiences each time you played. Even before Hades turned the San Francisco based studio from an indie darling into a phenomenon, their third game was viewed as a turn away from the style of their first two, both more straightforward RPGs in more recognizable genre packages. Pyre has become the odd middle child of Supergiant’s oeuvre.
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