Pyre

First off, if you can't stomach visual novels you'll want to avoid this. During the first four hours, the gameplay has far more RPG-style management and dialogue than gameplay. After that, it starts to even out. Speaking of gameplay, this game is a unique experience in that it's a high-fantasy tackle-basketball game with RPG elements and a graphic novel structure. I won't spoil the story twist - which is great - but there's also an element of campaign management (think Banner Saga) thrown in partway through. It's strange, but well done and engaging. While the gameplay is solid, this game focuses more heavily on presentation. There's a huge cast of fantastically designed and (mostly) interesting characters that bounce off of each other wonderfully, and the art and music are outstanding. If you're looking for a unique experience or enjoy either visual novels or sports management games, you should definitely give this a shot. PROS: -Excellent art and scoring -Great setting and characters -Unique and interesting gameplay once it gets going CONS: -Slow start

The game Pyre is from the indie studio SuperGiant and whats impressive to me is every game that they make is completely different. There is a theme where every game has a well-written Narrative but Bastion is an action game, Transistor is a turn-based strategy game and Pyre is a sports game. The studio has a range and that’s great, unfortunately, I couldn’t get into Pyre. From people that I have spoken to, they seemed to love the game and its characters but I just didn’t connect with them. I enjoyed the sports aspect of the game but even that wasn’t quite enough for me to get connected to the game. This is a game that I wanted to enjoy but after about 2 hours, it just didn’t do anything for me.

What began as a captivating story with memorable characters and colorful landscapes soon had my interest plateau when the game, divided into two parts, travelling and 'the rites', was unable to keep my interest beyond the half-way point. The gameplay is a mix of occult with sports, sprinkled with some RPG elements, certainly unique but certainly not exciting. You play with your choice of three members for your team against another team of three, and to truly excel at the game you're expected to use all three members in synchronicity to perform quick passes, long range banishes and clutch saves. However, in my experience I could easily just use one character per round without any trouble leaving my other members standing idle probably contemplating how they're winning without any team effort on their part. Even when you do bother to utilize your teammates to the fullest, only being able to move one member at a time just doesn't click in what should be a fast paced sport/combat game. The game does have its positives, with fantastic visuals, great soundtrack, and the unique voice acting is perfect for every character. But with all that, when it comes down to it, it's core aspect just doesn't keep me itching to perform the next rite, nor care to hone my skills in the practice area. I had bought this because of the company's track record with Bastion and Transistor, but honestly I regret paying more than $10 for this.

This is a disappointing entry from Supergiant games, and I can see why it's not as popular as their other titles. Pyre pairs bad repetitive gameplay with a nonsensical story and try-hard world-building. This last part is heart-breaking to me, because Bastion and Transistor are masterpieces of story-telling. Each game first lured you in by the beauty and strangeness of their worlds, and then slowly fed piecemeal bits of lore to the player to expand upon the mystery. Pyre in contrast drops lore dumps after every battle, throwing out new names and terms with little meaning, until you stop caring. The story itself was some contrived plot of having to play games to perform rites for "reasons." This is how you don't tell a story. The gameplay itself is something like battle soccer with each side having 3 players. It would be tolerable as a Final Fantasy mini-game, but having it be the core of the entire experience gets old fast. Periodically you also have to pick one of your best team members to leave your group permanently. The mechanics of this are poorly explained, and you will likely end up losing party members you need or like. This is just bad game design. What is still present here is the technical quality of the studio, with smooth bug-free gameplay, and good art direction. Ultimately Pyre is a curious misstep in the history of this studio, which they wonderfully recovered from with Hades.

Supergiant games are always so overrated. The only positive I can give this game is that they tried something somewhat new with the gameplay. At the end of the day it's painfully simple, calling it an RPG should be considered a crime, and there is zero depth to this game. It should be a 5 dollar game at most. This is 2017 and this is the type of stuff that passes for a top rated console game? Give me a break. Completely linear bullcrap. It's like a game for three year olds. How dumbed down do devs need to make their games? Is the general populous really this dumb that they can't handle a semi complex game?