Pyre

I came into Pyre expecting another action RPG from the Bastion lineage and got something I still struggle to categorize cleanly. The core loop is 3-on-3 arena combat called the Rites, where your triumvirate of exiles passes a celestial orb around a top-down field and tries to dunk it into the opposing team's pyre flame to drain its health. One character moves at a time. Carrying the orb in makes you vulnerable to banishment. Throwing it in from range is safer but scores less. It lands somewhere between Rocket League's spatial urgency and a MOBA's character-switching instinct, and it genuinely works once the muscle memory kicks in. The nine playable exiles all have distinct movement archetypes. Jodariel is a slow-moving tank whose carry scores big but leaves her exposed for an entire round. Rukey is a fast cur who chips away quickly but needs good positioning to matter. Ti'zo is a flying imp who zips across the arena but barely dents the pyre on impact. Between regular Rites, you upgrade characters through a skill tree with eight abilities per character and 46 equippable Talismans, but here is the catch that makes Pyre genuinely unusual: the Liberation Rites. Once you qualify, you can win freedom for one of your three most-experienced characters, and they leave your party permanently. You are literally training your roster to say goodbye to it. That tension between building someone up and knowing you will lose them is the beating heart of the whole game, and Supergiant earns every gut punch it delivers. The Versus Mode drops the story wrapper and lets two players run head-to-head with teams drawn from the campaign roster. It is local-only, which is a real limitation. There is no online play, and that absence was felt at launch and still stings now if you do not have someone on the couch. The default PC keyboard controls are reportedly rough out of the box, though full rebinding and native controller support (including PS4 pads) fix that fast. On PC, performance is solid; the framerate complaints that surfaced on console at launch were largely a console-specific issue. Where the game divides people is the sheer volume of reading. Between every Rite there are dialogue exchanges, lore drops, and branching choose-your-own-adventure decisions that shape character relationships and influence the story's ending. Pyre does not have a skip-the-story difficulty toggle the way later Supergiant titles do. If you are here for the sport and not the fiction, you cannot bypass the fiction. If you are here for the fiction and find 3-on-3 fantasy basketball disorienting, you still have to play the sport. That uneasy compromise is why Pyre sits as Supergiant's least-discussed catalog entry despite being, in many ways, its most ambitious creative swing. If the concept clicks for you, the combination of Darren Korb's genre-shifting score, some of the most distinctive character writing Supergiant has produced, and a sport that is fast-paced and tactically interesting past the surface level adds up to something memorable. The Metacritic consensus of 82 is honest: this is a well-made, genuinely original game with a clear audience ceiling. Know which half of the genre mashup you care about before you buy in, and manage expectations on the multiplayer side accordingly.

Fred · Scout Team

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