Pyre is a Game of Strategic Goodbyes
Warning: this review contains spoilers for major gameplay and story mechanics for Supergiant Games’ Pyre.
At first, Pyre is a role-playing game about being lost.
As a reader in a world where reading is forbidden by law, Pyre begins with your character awakening after having been banished from the privileged Commonwealth to the diverse wastes of the Downside. In the Downside, Supergiant Games’ knack for world-building is on full display as players are thrown headfirst into a world populated with strange races, inhuman scenery, and fantasy-rich history.
Though this world is more foreign than any previous Supergiant Games title, Pyre slowly, carefully inducts you into its world as you drift across its locales with your group of travelers, the Nightwings. These early hours of the game introduce you to the characters who will populate the remainder of the game through the rites, sports-like rituals where two teams of three compete to extinguish the opposing team’s pyre flame by dunking an orb into it.
Early on, the game reaches a kind of predictable rhythm: you drift along in your wagon, visit different mythological landmarks, and conduct Rites against opposing groups with no clear end-goal or purpose.
Then, Pyre becomes a sports game about saying goodbye to your friends.
After completing rites across the entire Downside, you reach a mountain that resembles a massive cathedral, commanding reverence with its towering statues and stained-glass backdrop. Without significant warning, you’re given a choice: which of your teammates would you like to nominate for freedom and remove from the remainder of the game? Given your victory in this first liberation rite, the character you chose is returned to the Commonwealth, only to be heard from one final time in the form of a letter that bears one sentence from the liberated character.
Every time it surfaces, this decision is complicated by a persistent mechanic that only lets you choose from your three most experienced characters to nominate for the liberation rite, limiting you to saying goodbye to the characters you’re most comfortable using.
This first liberation rite was like a gut punch to me. Characters had talked of the possibility of earning freedom through the rites, but having to choose from my three most experienced characters was a surprise that impacted me more than anything else in the game. Pyre revealed itself to be much more complicated than the game equivalent of a road movie crossed with a sports movie. Pyre is about strategic goodbyes, knowing that, as you free characters through the liberation rites, the Nightwings lose teammates and friends, and the player misses out on the stories those characters would have told if they remained with your group.
After this first liberation rite, the careful world building and limited freedom that characterize the early hours of the game give way to a much more open and complicated structure. Pyre lets you loose on the gorgeous world of the Downside, allowing you to traverse it as much as you like in between the rites that continue to structure the game.
Through this more player-guided navigation, the Downside begins to become familiar, comforting in its vivid locales despite being a land steeped in hardship and inhospitable climates. However, there’s always the promise that you’ll soon be called back to the towering mountain cathedral on the outskirts of the Downside to participate in another liberation rite and to say goodbye to another character.
Though there’s a broader overarching story involving those you have sent up to the Commonwealth, Pyre’s story is grounded by the inherent stress and complicated decision-making that accompanies the knowledge that the next liberation rite is at most a few rites away. Who do you use more and risk having to lose? Which of your three most experienced characters is the most expendable, both in the stories they tell by interacting with other remaining characters and in how useful they are on your team?
Pyre’s story is grounded by the inherent stress and complicated decision-making that accompanies each liberation rite.
Of course, you’re able to plan ahead and focus in on a character you’re less comfortable with to get them experienced enough to participate in the next liberation rite, though as they participate in more rites to gain experience, you get to see more of their history and interactions with other characters, leaving an inevitable hole in your team when you win their freedom. Each of these characters are well-written and have satisfying story arcs that you sacrifice the ability to experience if you liberate them before seeing their arcs through to the end.
It’s important to note that even if you fail in the liberation rite, the game continues and the character you nominated for liberation remains in the Downside, though this has an impact on the overarching story as you permanently miss an opportunity for a character’s freedom. This leads to more open-ended options for the story, as you’re always able to lose rites on purpose and liberate characters from other teams if you happen to grow attached to them as you learn more about their histories.
These loaded decisions in the liberation rites lead to character beats and smaller-scale stories varying dramatically across different playthroughs. Since the plot continues whether you win or lose each rite, it’s impossible not to wonder what might happen if play the game differently next time
It’s always really exciting to me when I feel compelled to replay a game immediately after finishing it, and in Pyre the myriad of endings available for each character (depending on your in-game options and success in the rites) tempted me to immediately jump back in after saying my final goodbyes to my first playthrough, though I think I’ll save that for when I need a pick-me-up later.
Pyre is a stellar game that encourages strategy in how you approach which characters you use throughout the game, revealing different stories depending on which characters go up against different teams, which characters play alongside each other in the rites, and which characters stay in the Downside together or are separated through the liberation rites. The inherent stress of these decisions makes Pyre’s story much more malleable and inherently stressful than Supergiant Games’ other titles, and this flexibility in the story pays off in the highly-personalized nature of the emotional impact it has on players.
