3.5/5 ★ – PhenomAnon's review of Pyre.

Last on the list for my journey through Supergiants catalogue and perhaps my most anticipated. It’s the one I knew the least about going in and seems generally to be a bit of a dark horse among Supergiants excellent body of work. That said I left feeling slightly mixed on this one. As ever the art and music are second to none. The characters are all charming and well rounded. The narrative is compelling and rich. And the gameplay is slick and deceptively deep. I loved all my digital friends which made many of the narrative choices quite difficult. I really deliberated over them (staying vague in purpose to avoid potential spoilers) and agonized over whether I did the right thing. I had fun with the gameplay and the smooth animations though it never fully clicked for me (more on that below). So why the 3.5 review? Well two main reasons. For one the pacing of the game is odd. It’s sort of half visual novel and half sports game but it feels like you spend too much time in between rounds of the game slowly moving around the map and chatting with your compatriots. From the visual novel side it feels like it is too often interrupted by minor interactions (select the location, click on the wagon, click on the character, have som dialogue, click out of the wagon, click the next location, more dialogue) to deliver its story smoothly. And second I never felt like I was able to grasp the gameplay on a more than superficial level. This led to some frustration when bumping up difficulty via the titan stars (optional gameplay modifiers much like heat in Hades) as it felt like the AI could just react better and faster than me. I recognize this as a personal problem and that one can choose to disable the more challenging options but then the gameplay felt a bit too easy with being able to easily defeat any foe. Very much a “your mileage may vary” type situation. Someone with faster fingers and reflexes probably won’t have that issue. All in all it might be Supergiants most unique and most interesting game to date with its fascinating, fleshed out, and wholly unique world even if it didn’t fully click with me on a personal level. At a minimum it’s worth checking out if for no other reason than this developper has earned it.