Pyre

This is where you can deliberate anything relating to videogames - past, present and future
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JaySevenZero
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Pyre

Post by JaySevenZero »

Here's where you can contribute your thoughts and opinions for Pyre for potential inclusion in the forthcoming podcast.

A friendly reminder that where the feedback for the podcast is concerned, we love it - but keeping it brief is appreciated. We do want to include a breadth of opinions where appropriate, but no-one wants a discussion podcast that’s mostly reading out essays. Better to save yourself time and cut to the chase if you can.
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Toon Scottoon
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Re: 524: Pyre

Post by Toon Scottoon »

If you like sports and sports culture, then the story and gameplay of Pyre are likely going to feel as familiar as the squeak of new sneakers on a parquet floor. Like Mighty Ducks coach Gordon Bombay or The Longest Yard's Paul Crewe, you are found guilty of a crime, and as a result find yourself rounding up a ragtag bunch of athletes to play a sport that sort of looks like basketball and sort of looks like the Mesoamerican ballgame played in the Mayan creation myth the Popal-Vuh, but with swagged out dogs and magic exploding flappy birds and an element of firefighting, all of which is truly fun on its own.

However once you've notched a few victories and given one rousing Norman Dale, Tony D'Amato, Ted Lasso style speech, the game gives you the chance to eject one of your players out of the penal colony and beyond the stars. This shoves Pyre's subject matter towards something more universal than sports, mortality. The transformation hinges on the brilliant decision to make the number of liberation rights limited, creating an urgency felt by actual athletes who know that as the saying goes, "father time is undefeated", and no matter how many W's a team or player collects, there is always the nagging desire to achieve glory once more.

Pyre is never going to be as popular of a fake sports coaching simulator as Pokemon, but through its thoughtful combination of story and mechanics both familiar and new, it has made an evangelical fan out of me.


Three word review - Reading and Riting
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Shinywailordguy
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Re: 524: Pyre

Post by Shinywailordguy »

I absolutely loved Pyre. Not so much for the fantasy basketball gameplay, which was perfectly fine, but for the sense of atmosphere and for the amazing characters.

As I grew to know and care for each of them, it became harder and harder to deal with the responsibility of having their fates in my hands. Knowing that I could help them escape to a better life, but that would mean never seeing them again, made for a series of gut-wrenching decisions throughout the game. I could never re-play it because the story of what happened during my first and only playthrough is still engraved in my mind and I would hate to rewrite any of it.

Special shoutout to the end credits song, which has customised verses for each character depending on the decisions you made in your playthrough - I thought that was incredible.
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RadicalDog
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Re: 524: Pyre

Post by RadicalDog »

My favourite Supergiant game! I like the basketball type gameplay a lot, and think it makes for a very inspired scenario that's not like anything else I've read. From a storytelling perspective, I have to give credit to the devs for the massive branching potential as different teams could be fighting for their place in the tournament. I did try to accept the results without savescumming to see what would happen, and I'd encourage everyone to set the difficulty high enough to challenge them. However there were a handful of "must win" results, as well as at least one match thrown to help Nae's love get through. I played this right after Mass Effect 3, and quite the contrast - instead of 3 different coloured endings, there must be tens of thousands of combinations in Pyre!
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Girard
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Re: 524: Pyre

Post by Girard »

Prior to Pyre, I hadn't enjoyed SuperGiant games very much. While I could respect the polish of their art and mechanics, neither of those facets had managed to grab me, and they'd always felt a bit generic.

Consequently I slept on Pyre, despite friends recommending it to me, and only picked it up a year or two after release in some bundle or sale. I wound up really enjoy it. It felt like the visual novel format allowed artist Jen Zee to get a but more ambitious and varied in her designs for the myriad characters, and it also allowed for them to be compellingly written and bounce off of each other in interesting ways.

The way that the story dynamically reshaped itself around your wins and losses (or so I hear - I never lost on my playthrough 8-) ) likewise felt like a significant upgrade in terms of interactive storytelling from Bastion's 11th-hour "choose ending A or B, please" design.
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Seph
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Re: 524: Pyre

Post by Seph »

After picking Pyre up in a bundle recently, I decided to give it a go in time for the show and because Supergiant Games haven't disappointed me yet. While I wasn't let down and I enjoyed my playthrough, I would probably place this at the bottom of their releases so far.

I felt like the gameplay was missing something. I don't like that the players stand still when not used and are still open to attack, it just made pushing forward with everyone a little useless to me. My tactic was to use a faster character to wipe out the team and quickly switch to a brute for a big score. The rites felt like an interesting idea with a good sports-based element, but it's something that could definitely be improved with a second game (but that's not the Supergiant style).

Full multiplayer support for this game would be a lot of fun. Around this time, Roll7 released Laser League; which has a similar sports/attack game style, but is based around multiplayer and is incredibly fun. I know Supergiant care more about telling stories, but if they would have added something like this I imagine Pyre would be a regular feature at my future game parties.

One thing that did impress me was the characterisation of the main team. The overall story left me a little cold, but I liked learning more about each character and why they deserved to go free, and that the game seemingly adapts to every choice, victory and loss. I'm not sure if this happens in every playthrough, but I liked how Pamitha was begging me to let her sister win. While I had no attachment to the opposing team and that particular, I was close to actually letting it happen because the plead was so strong, but I decided to let fate take its course and I won in the end. Part of me wishes I could have changed this, but at the same time I wanted one of my team to go home. I only lost one game in total (to the True Nightwings, who completely blindsided me), but I like how there isn't a game over for losing. Life just goes on.

The main positives are the visuals and the music. The artists at Supergiant are among the best in the business and everything looks so fluid and beautiful. I wish there was more opportunity to explore and discover places, but the game is keen to move you forward at all times. Darren Korb is the company's not-so-secret weapon and he has never hit a bum note.
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Jon Cheetham
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Re: Our next podcast recording (19.6.22) - 524: Pyre

Post by Jon Cheetham »

This is one of the best games I will very possibly never want to play again. Not because there was any aspect of it I did not enjoy, but because the story the game handcrafted just for me based on both my decisions and the outcomes of the rites feels so finished and perfect. I fell in love with this brightly coloured land of exiles and the many plucky weirdos fighting for their freedom in it. With each conversation, each victory and each defeat, I became more invested in the story that was unfolding, based partly on my deliberate choices and partly on how the rites shook out. The endings for my team felt canonical.

In my mind, Rukey, Hedwyn and Jodariel did make it out, and are fighting the good fight they always wanted to. Volfred didn't. The mastermind behind it all remains in the Downside, waiting for snatches of intel from the Commonwealth and the revolution brewing there. Pamitha, the star player of almost all the rites, likewise stayed behind, remaining in my place after a hard-fought Liberation Rite. As weary of fighting as she was, it felt a suitable end to her story, and a chance to decide her own path in a way her life had so often denied her.

The feeling I had when I finished the game was one I usually only get from finishing a brilliant novel - heartache not to be with those characters any more and for their time together to be definitively over, but certainty that simply restarting would never be the same. All the more so because of Pyre's mutable narrative.

Pyre also has some of the most gorgeous art ever made by the incredible Jen Zee and my personal favourite Darren Korb soundtrack. 'Knights of the Sea', what a tune! I had the soundtrack on repeat for days after finishing this.
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Tleprie
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Re: Our next podcast recording (19.6.22) - 524: Pyre

Post by Tleprie »

Supergiant's usual adjustable difficulty pairs so well with Pyre's sports league tragedy. There were opponents I felt so strongly equally deserved their liberation, even if the Nightwing's ultimate goal was pure, that I would set the difficulty for some rites to an insurmountable challenge. If I could win, great, but I was fine with losing those.

Each character was so well developed that it was bittersweet to see any one of them go.

Pyre is among my all time favorites, I'd love to see Supergiant make a return to this sort of experimentation, and while I love that they continue creating new characters, I wouldn't mind seeing Jodariel and the crew again some day.

(Supergiant is building a large enough catalog of characters, they could do their own kart racer or Mario Party with all the previous games' casts)
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