Update One Hundred and Thirty-Eight: 10 March 2018

☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆

I debated whether to do this review after I’ve slept (it’s currently 5:36 in the morning and I’ve been playing Pyre for four hours straight), and had to weigh the emotional high vs. the intelligability of whatever it is I’d end up writing. I’ve made the executive decision to go ahead and write this down because Supergiant Games has done it again, surprising no one who’s played Pyre in the past - what - eight months it’s been out(1).

I’ll be honest - it took me about three hours in before I liked Pyre. I don’t play sports games, and the Rites BAFFLED me at first. I felt no more confident after the first three matches as I had before the tutorial. I couldn’t get comfortable with it, not for a while, not until I practiced. The story felt the same way, too - I felt as sandblasted and confused as the player character did, faced with all of these Proper Nouns I didn’t understand just yet. The first full ‘game loop’ is its longest, and it felt very slow to me. And, worst of all, this is Logan Cunningham’s least kissable VO role to date. While it demonstrates his INCREDIBLE range and skill as an actor (I literally had to double-check if The Voice was him, his snooty old fashioned Brrrritish accent was SPOT ON), it was a bit of a let down after his role as The Perfect Boyfriend in Transistor. All of these things resulted in a feeling of remove from the game, a glass wall between my heart and this piece of media.

But ceremony and rituals are literally made to join multiple things together in commonality, in unison, and they have a particular use in bonding together and in building mythos and meaning from nothing. And, slowly, it worked. I began getting into it. I got used to the gameplay, though I will forever be relegated to Easy Baby Mode. The lore of the world began to sink in, to make sense to me, its complicated designs more within my reach the longer I sat with it.

What really turned the tide and swayed my heart was when the mythology of the game and the meta-mythology of Supergiant itself met. (This is a minor end of Act 1 spoiler, skip the rest of this paragraph if you don’t want to see it) When the Nightwings, your compatriots, reach the end of the Downside, to the highest, most sacred ritual ground, the Lone Minstrel, who has remained a mysterious figure in your party, finally joins in as a part of the rite. He presides over the Rite opposite Celeste, another minstrel and a gatekeeper your team had to impress - and you see them both, looking over the ritual grounds. The Voice starts the match off, like he always does, and then he falls silent. And then the Lone Minstrel and Celeste sing, and it’s Darren Korb and Ashely Barrett. It’s Zulf and Zia. It’s Red. It’s familiar, haunting, beloved voices weaving a ballad about the Liberation Rite you’re playing, and specifically who you’re playing against. What you’re fighting for, and what that means.

That’s when I knew this was special. And it was all uphill from there.

I could talk about how I couldn’t liberate my favorite characters - Pamitha and the Moon-Touched Girl (who I named Fae, it seemed apropo). I valued speed over anything else, and they were too dear to me to let go. I could talk about the subtly-reinforced and beautiful way your POV character becomes an actual CHARACTER, and your opportunity to really show what that meant was realized in an incredible way. I could talk about how smart the game was in how it layers new things slowly, but doesn’t handhold. I could talk about how I need to find all the fanart about Tariq and Celeste making out and the Moon-Touched Girl being happy and surrounded by friends.

But the sun is steadily rising, and I’ve got sleep I have to get. This is probably wacky enough to parse as it is, and I should call it quits while I can still string a semi-coherent really long sentence together. As I sleep, my brain will be whirling at everything I’ve just seen, and probably one last line that will calm my heart for a long time coming.

The sky may be dark, but “the stars are not gone. The stars have joined us.”

Next up: snnnnnz

See you soon!

(1) I don’t know why, but I am a chronic late-new-Supergiant-game-player. I think it’s because I have such ardent feelings for each game I play, I instinctively dislike this NEW thing because it’s NEW and not the thing I already adore, it’s different. And yet, every time I just have a new good thing I adore. Get with the fuckin program, me.