Supergiant Games' Pyre is, like all of their prior games, just sumptuous. But while I loved Bastion and Transistor, thought the art was beautiful and six types of jaw-dropping, Pyre - Pyre is something else. Pyre, with its surreal designs and otherworldly colour palette, made me catch my breath in places, made me ache in the way that you sometimes do when you're in the presence of Good Art. Which sounds pretentious, but hey I stand by it. It is Dante's Inferno by way of Jean Giraud. It's an operatic underworld myth.
And also, this chimera of a game that is part football, part arena-combat, part choose-your-own-adventure, and part - actually, I don't know how else to describe it. The developers call Pyre a 'party-based RPG' but I don't think that description is anywhere near adequate.
Am ambitious exercise in slow worldbuilding, Pyre opens with your character being discovered by a triumvirate of masked figures. They rouse you, ask about your past, bring up nouns that aren't really explained, but you're given a general idea of what is going on, and end up being recruited by their group in record time. They need a Reader to facilitate an escape from this unearthly place, and that's you.
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