Pyre
Pyre Review
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.
Pyre is worth playing for its exciting matches alone, but what makes it worthy of renown is how it leverages the tension of competition to tell a captivating story. Like Roman gladiators, the characters you bring into battle are ultimately competing for freedom. Lose these pivotal liberation rites, however, and kiss that chance goodbye. With a fixed number of liberation rites throughout the story, you have limited chances to help your friends.
Depending on the opponent, arena, and your playstyle, you might plant two defensive characters with large auras on your pyre as living barriers (placing them close together combines their auras) and have a single speedster solely responsible for ball-running – but since a character who just ran a successful dive doesn’t respawn for the next round, this means having to count on the fact that you can out-score the enemy team with a roughly even number of goals, or somehow score with one of your tanks when you’re a man down. Creating an aggressive squad that blitzes down the field by passing the orb back and forth frequently is vulnerable to having it snatched by a flying character who can go on to score behind their backs. The campaign even features a number of handicaps you can unlock at the start of a match that grant you more experience, and make up for the fact that the AI, while it puts up a good fight, just can’t compete with an experienced human player.
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.
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