Once you gain the invitation to partake in the first one, you realize that liberation in the world of Pyre means just that: You choose a member of your crew at the start of the Rite, and if you win, that character gains their freedom from the Downside and leaves your party and your adventure for good. This progression loop becomes second nature, until the realization of the first Liberation Rite comes along and shatters all of the preconceived notions you had about how the game would unfold. The catch is that you can only move one character at any given moment, and you’re ostensibly powerless and vulnerable when in control of the Orb, which is where the bulk of the Rites’ strategy and dynamics comes into play. Ultimately they are 3v3 competitions where each team’s goal is to gain control of the Celestial Orb and use it to douse the opposing team’s pyre by carrying it into the flames. The Rites are a competition that’s a bit like if the commissioner of the NBA were a Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Master, and the halftime shows consisted of a poetry reading. Together you roam the land via caravan, bonding with one another and occasionally partaking in the Rites. There, you gradually gather a wandering crew of fellow exiles, each of a different race with unique skills and attributes. The 2017 follow-up to Bastion and Transistor places you in the role of the Reader, who awakes in a pastel fantasy world known as the Downside.
However, it’s a rare game that is able to weave together the mechanical gameplay choices with the larger, more narrative-driven world choices into a single cohesive system, but that’s exactly what developer Supergiant’s incredible Pyre does on a level I don’t think I’ve seen before or since in video games. Sometimes games come along where your narrative choices impact the state of the world and its inhabitants, like choosing to save or destroy Megaton in Fallout 3 or the myriad micro-decisions you make via dialogue in Telltale’s The Wolf Among Us. On a mechanical level, you choose to have Mario leap over a Goomba, you choose which play to run in Madden and how to execute on it, and you choose what to point and shoot at in Call of Duty. The main thing that differentiates video games from all other mediums is a sense of choice. This article contains spoilers for Pyre from Supergiant Games.
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