Others feature chasms that must be jumped, flown, or teleported across.
Some have moving obstacles or blocks that can be pushed around to create a makeshift defensive perimeter. There’s no lack of diversity, visually or mechanically, when it comes to the playing fields. This gives rise to a whole range of tactics based on positioning your inactive teammates to passively defend your pyre by obstructing the other team. The trick is that while there are three characters on a team, you’re only able to move one at a time. It’s sort of like a combination between football and basketball where the ball carrier is vulnerable to “banishment” – being removed from the match for a short period of time – by coming into contact with an enemy player’s aura (which varies in size based on their stats) or being hit by a special attack.
But instead, we get The Trials: a hectic, highly tactical, real-time battle system that feels more than a little like a fantasy world version of NBA Jam in which the object is to have one of your three characters run or throw an orb into the enemy pyre until their points are depleted. The Trials feel more than a little like a fantasy world version of NBA Jam.If the outstanding choice-focused visual novel portion was all Pyre had to offer and conflicts were resolved with simple dice rolls, it would probably still be an amazing game. Between all of the fates I could choose for certain characters over Pyre’s 20 hours and a Mass Effect 3-style progress tracker that determines how well your ultimate plan is enacted, the number of possible endings seems expansive. And the number of ways each character’s story can go had my head spinning with the possible paths I could follow in my next playthrough. It’s so masterfully plotted, setting up situations where gameplay considerations must constantly be weighed against tugs at my own heartstrings. I struggled with the decision mightily through many Trials, and of all the earthshaking choices I made throughout the last act, the one that left the greatest emotional impression on me had to do with Rukey’s wish. The catch? Granting him his wish would remove him from my roster forever. Something I felt like I would be a monster to deny him. But by chance, while following an optional objective on our travels I overheard Rukey praying to the stars for something he really wanted in his heart of hearts.
The strategies I’d developed all had him at their center. Rukey Greentail is one of your first companions and quickly became my star orb-runner in The Trials, with his speed and agility forming the cornerstone of my playstyle. It’s hard to explain exactly what I mean without spoiling some large parts of the story, but I’ll share an example of how a choice I knew I would one day have to make became the emotional heart of the experience for me – even more so than the main plot. Choices you make here will uncover elements of your comrades’ pasts, steer your journey down branching courses with meaningful consequences, and ultimately decide both the course of the world above and the one below.īranching storylines have become common in games, but it’s rare that one integrates momentous, gut-wrenching choices with the other elements of its gameplay as deftly as Pyre does. Interactions with the diverse, lovable, many-layered party members and the constellation of memorable opponents and side characters who surround them take place in a delightfully hand-drawn overworld that you navigate via something approaching a visual novel, similar to the style of the campaign of a Fire Emblem game. Interactions take place in a delightfully hand-drawn overworld.Your task is to put together a kind of mystical sports team to compete in an arcane ritual called The Trials, which are the only way for criminals exiled to a bleak frontier called the Downside to earn a pardon and return to the shining Commonwealth from whence they came.
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