Pyre Is a Game About a Game—But It's Really About Why We Play
We pass through the gate leading up to the summit. When we reach the top, the liberation rite will begin. Prismatic light trickles down from on high as we climb and make our preparations. Set our uniforms just so. Put on the ritual masks. Stretch. This is magic, but it's something else, something much simpler: it's a sport. One last match, this one with huge stakes. This is the world of Pyre.
The third game by beloved independent developer Supergiant Games (Bastion, Transistor), Pyre is about a magical tournament of sorts called the Rites. The competitors are all exiles, criminals cast out of the civilization of the Commonwealth into the wilds of a land known as the Downside; for the victors, the Rites are a ticket home from isolation, and back into society. In the game, out now for PC and PlayStation 4, you play as a Reader, a being with the ability to read from the Book of Rites—and, with its magic, conduct the competition. You control your allies in matches from the safety of the book. It's a role both secure and terrifying; you risk nothing, but everything relies on your performance.
The Rites themselves play out like a sort of mystic version of Ultimate Frisbee. Each side has three players and must defend a goal—their sacred flame, the eponymous pyre. There's a ball, a celestial orb, and each team must try to score by placing the orb, and often their bodies with it, in the opposing pyre. Like Ultimate Frisbee, only certain players can move at certain times; in Supergiant's version, it's the orb holders who move while the rest of their team is stationary. One opponent can move at a time against the orb holder, in hopes of tagging the enemy, temporarily banishing them from the field. The first team to score a number of goals, thereby extinguishing the opponent's pyre, wins.
But while the rules might create the shape of the game—the Rites, or any other game—they have little to do with its true purpose.
The Point of the Points
I've been thinking a lot about sports lately. I recently read 17776: What Football Will Look Like in the Future, a fascinating and bizarre piece of web art by SBNation's Jon Bois. In it, he portrays a future where mankind has become immortal through wholly mysterious means; no one dies, but no one is born. Eight billion people, living their lives eternally, free of disease or danger or death. From the perspective of a group of artificial intelligences watching mankind from space, Bois explores the role of leisure—in particular, American football—in the lives of people with nothing but time.
As Bois tells it, play becomes everything. Football becomes a sprawling, amorphous mutation of itself, played across entire states over hundreds, even thousands of years. In the absence of threats, mankind devotes itself entirely to sport. Sports provide conflict, and entertainment, where natural lives fail to. In the absence of loss, Bois posits, boredom is the ultimate enemy. And sports are a communal hedge against boredom.
But what about sport's role in the presence of loss? In a world with as much death and terror as the real one? Pyre imagines a life similarly obsessed with competition, just for the precisely opposite reasons. In the Downside, the sport of the Rites isn't a means of stimulating our inherent desire for conflict and risk; it's our only means of transcending conflict and risk gone too far.
Your comrades in the Rites are criminals in the eyes of the Commonwealth, but what that means for each of them is different. Some committed serious offenses—desertion, murder—but not all of them. Your only crime was being literate, an offense in the eyes of the theocratic regime. For that crime, you are left for dead in a wild, unending wasteland. For you, competition is a means of redressing that fundamental injustice. It's not just striving. It's rebellion.
As both works of art point out, the urge to play and compete is endemic to humanity, but it's also defined wholly by its context. It's an impulse that we build meaning for as we go; it can be an escape or an outlet for aggression, a means to community or a means of opportunity. Pyre is the story of a team of players caught between winning a game and trying to make sense of it. They're seeking freedom, and also trying to define freedom on their own terms. After all, the Commonwealth is just as brutal, in its way, as the wilderness of the Downside. Is returning really the prize it appears to be?
Supergiant Games presents these questions through an imagined sport that's fast and riveting. It combines the mundanity of a ball-based sport with magic complications in the form of transforming arenas, flying competitors, consuming flames. Its cross between Ultimate Frisbee, dodgeball, and a magician's duel is easily the highlight of the game. That's fortunate, because you're going to be doing it a lot. Pyre looks like a standard role-playing game, but its rhythms are those of a career mode in a modern sports game: a text-based story with events and choices built around the repetition of the Rites. You develop a roster, a competitive record, even rivalries. You learn the game on a deep level, and you try to master it.
The material around the competition is less riveting. Supergiant Games has always excelled at theme in mood. Their previous game, Transistor, remains one of the most evocative games in recent memory. But they have often struggled, and continue to struggle here, with the details. The characters feel just a hair flatter than they should, their conflicts defined too slowly or too indistinctly to really hold weight. Some details of the world are muddled, and even beautiful art and music can't quite cover over the sense that Supergiant builds fantasies they don't entirely understand. Early on, the game establishes that the power of the Rites comes from and is contained within the Reader's book, and yet its participants seem to be able to use the same abilities at arbitrary points outside of the games as well—for reasons that aren't clear and don't seem to be thought through. And much of the game's backstory is relayed through that same book, turning what should be a compelling set of revelations into homework.
And yet there remains that spark in my mind, a little pyre of my own built out of a lingering fascination with what the game is doing. It might just be the right game at the right time, for me. But it provokes questions that feel worth asking, and it does so with a blend of genres and ideas I've never seen before.
Nine, the viewpoint character of 17776, is hung up for most of the story's run with the question of why. Why sports? Why football? What's the point? Pyre, ultimately, sits with many of the same questions, placing you in the position of both asking and trying to provide your own answers. As you gear up for the liberation rites, the mystic path back to the Commonwealth just out of reach, you might wonder: Why do they play?
But, then again, why do you?
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