The gameplay loop is simple enough, if we, again, want to oversimplify what makes Pyre so loving and so loved. Because learning people’s stories-learning your own story as a gently-fourth-wall-breaking character within Pyre itself-is all part of the game’s dopamine drip feed. Your crimes and the crimes of your fellows are for you to find out. You and everyone else in the Downside has been banished here, living out a life sentence handed down for your crimes back in the Commonwealth. You’re competing against other triumvirates for your freedom. The Rites are games in which the characters form two teams of three and face off against one another in those purgatory-sponsored games of soccer/muckle/NBA Jam. Those that can read the stars can follow them to where the Rites take place. That alone uniquely qualifies you to read not only books, but stars. You, dear reader, are a Reader in the land of Pyre. Now that we have a few convenient labels to work with, go ahead and ignore them, because Pyre carves out a one-of-a-kind category for itself. Yes, Pyre also happens to be a slick little soccer/muckle/NBA Jam Fest couched in a party-based role-playing game. Pyre mystifies the production of literature, deifies collectors of books, and makes the art of reading an answer to a person’s highest calling. While Pyre is not writers writing about writing, it’s entirely a game that fetishizes a writer’s tools of the trade. It’s a meta-cliche where self-gratification and the imperative to Write What You Know meet and often give each other a clammy handshake. “Writers writing about writing.” It’s a meta-cliche among, you guessed it, writers.

Pyre review