I always played to win – instincts are hard to shake – but there were times loss carried with it a sigh of relief. Each member of your triumvirate granted freedom from exile represents the snuffed hopes of an adversary. There were multiple times in Pyre where my opponents victory felt just as worthy as my own. Sometimes, it is a flat denial of agency.Īt the risk of being crucified on a d-pad: What if I want to lose? The Ultimate Sacrifice ![]() It embraces what games would have us forget The ability to reload a save is not always a boon. ![]() The story of Pyre‘s supernatural world is told naturally enough to seed abhorrent vacuums of continuity with starlit forests of branching possibility. The baton is never dropped, always passed. Through this, the aftermath of competition is explored beyond the numerals of a leaderboard. It’s never a mistake to be erased or a history to be rewritten. An experience to brood over with friends whilst sipping drinks and licking wounds. Their innovation was to incorporate this most mundane of paratextual certainties – a menu feature that turns hapless adventurers into time manipulating deities – within their fictional worlds. Prince of Persia and Braid were not resonant simply because of their time reversal mechanics, but because they granted their protagonists something players have always had at their disposal. Free of consequence, we bounce planets together ’til the clangs reverberate just right. The rapid freezing and thawing of the continue.? continuum allows us to summon up entire universes of possibility to play in. With save states, we’re always pausing, even when we’re playing. Most astoundingly, Pyre is a sports game that makes loss just as worth exploring as victory. The feedback from a smoky lute ballad run through a distortion pedal. A pastel-hued cartographer’s fever dream. Pyre is a storybook with singed edges stained by spilt ink and filled with blank pages.
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