Before Hades, Supergiant’s Pyre Let You Lose and Changed the Game
Five years ago Supergiant’s third project reinvented game narration, again
Pyre has become the odd middle child of Supergiant’s oeuvre. 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. 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.
Pyre kept a lot of that customization. In fact, Pyre cemented it: do something twice and it’s a trend, but three times and it’s a calling card. 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. 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. 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.
But despite these refinements of past games’ mechanics, Pyre is remembered primarily as the time Supergiant did a sports game. 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 was fantasy sportsball, a left-field choice for a studio whose previous work had been a pastoral action RPG and a cyberpunk thriller. 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.
Pyre is different. The sports game you play at the beginning is the sports game you’re playing at the end. 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. 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 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. Each of the members of your team, the Nightwings, has their own playstyle and specialty: some of them are adept at banishing other players from the field, while others are better at jumping into the opposing player’s pyre and scoring points. They are your weapons, each suited to something different on the field. You don’t have to use all of them, but you’ll use most. All of them have their own backstories: they’ve been banished from the surface world into this purgatory for some reason, and they all have a reason they’d like to return, from resuming their jobs to seeing their families again. Each person you save will also have a role to play in the revolution brewing in the Commonwealth against the overly religious, anti-literacy government that has cast you all down.
Pyre’s revelation about a third of the way through is that your battles have been in service of a larger plot element the entire time. You do not just escape wholesale from the Downside when you win the Rites; only one player can go, and it’s the player you’ve used the most. Whoever has the most experience—and, because of how Pyre drip-feeds storytelling as characters level up, whoever you’ve learned most about—will be the first to go. Even if you win every match, only so many of your players can escape, but once they do they’re gone for good.