Great moments in PC gaming are bite-sized celebrations of some of our favorite gaming memories.

Supergiant's Pyre seems like a weird hybrid of a party-RPG and a 90s sports game for the first few hours, holding its narrative cards close to the chest. But when those cards finally hit the table the implications are weighty. Each time your team wins at The Trials, you get to send one of your teammates home from exile in the gloomy Downside to a much brighter future in the Commonwealth above. But this also means they leave your party forever. And never was this choice made more difficult or painful for me than in the case of Rukey Greentail.

Rukey is a rambunctious little, mustachioed… fox? Thing? And to say he was my star player would be understating it—he was the key to my whole offense. The point of almost every play was to get the orb to Rukey so he could scamper, scurry, dart, and dodge past the enemy team to slam and/or jam a few quick points into their pyre. When Rukey got a clean drive, he made it look easy. I based my entire strategy and playstyle around him. Why would I ever want to let him go?

But over time I started to connect with him more and learn some things that made my eyes sting. In his private moments, his only thoughts were of his dear old mother back in the Commonwealth and how worried she must be for him. He was genuinely heartbroken that his exile must be weighing so heavily on her, and that she was left to care for the rest of the family without his help. There were other exiles with very good reasons to be sent home, but Rukey connected with me the most on an emotional level. The Point of Maximum Feels came when I stumbled upon Rukey, unaware of my presence, praying to the stars that I would choose him to return home in the next trial.

Dear readers, scarcely ever has a game character hit me with such a Big Oof.

And yet the fact remained: He was my star player. Letting him go risked our success in all future trials, which could mean no one would get to go home after him. So I tried to have it all. I gambled Rukey's future on a gambit that would let me keep him as long as possible while still eventually letting him return home. One by one, I sent less deserving exiles back and asked Rukey to hang in there, planning for him to be the last exile I redeemed in the final, most difficult trial. 

This made our final match the most intense and nail-biting I've ever played. Even in other sports games when I've spent dozens of hours working my way up to the championship, nothing compared to the thought that I was playing for my dear friend's future. A future I could have secured a long time ago if I hadn't been so selfish. 

It was a close match, and I don't know that I would have been able to live with myself if we'd lost. But thanks in large part to Rukey, we came out in glorious victory. And at the last moment, I was given an unexpected choice that had up until now been off the table: I could be the one to go free in the final trial. The Commonwealth could use my leadership in these trying times after all…

I didn't hesitate. It had to be Rukey. He waited longer than he should have had to. He gave our team more than we deserved. It was one of the most satisfying gifts I have ever given another character in a videogame, even as he protested and tried to convince me to take his place. 

And then the stars went out, trapping the remaining three of us in the Downside forever. The headstrong Daemoness Jodariel and the fish knight Sir Gilman would be my eternal companions in this prison. And we all took it in stride. How could we possibly begrudge Rukey going home to his dear, fretting mother? I like to think we all lived happily ever after. This one's for you, Rukey.

Ever since EA opened the doors of Origin Access to other publishers last year, a steady stream of solid games have made their way to the service, which gives players access to a vault of more than 180 games for $30/£20 a year. The latest is Pyre, Supergiant Games' 2017 RPG-come-sports game, which is still worth playing today.

As noted in Wes's 71/100 review, the actual sports bit—a 3v3 ball game—is one-dimensional, and the campaign drags. But the characters are memorable and the writing is mostly superb, as you'd expect from Supergiant, who also made Bastion. 

The other new additions to Origin Access this month are Star Wars Jedi Knight: Dark Forces 2, Star Wars Jedi Knight 2: Jedi Outcast and adventure game Chaos on Deponia. Last month, EA added five Star Wars games.

The basic Origin Access subscription also gets you a 10-hour trial of seven newer games, including Anthem and They Are Billions. The premier version, which costs $100/£90 a year, gives you full access to these extra games. 

Sports games come in many shapes and sizes. Football Manager and Rocket League have almost nothing in common, but they’re both undeniably sports games. Meanwhile Fifa has added a story driven campaign, and Pyre is a fantasy RPG that plays like a sport.

To try and help, I’ve broken this list down into four broad categories. Sports Simulations, which attempt to realistically depict a sport, Sports Management games (self explanatory), Arcade Sports, which depict a stylised version of a real sport, and Fantasy Sports, which are wholly invented.

There’s obviously a lot of crossover, since even Rocket League is loosely based on football, but hopefully this will help you tell your QWOPs from your Fifas. 

SPORTS SIMS

Fifa 2018

Developer: EA SportsRelease Date: Sep 2017Link: Official site

EA's annual football series is on a high right now, with the addition of a surprisingly compelling single player story mode. Unlike PES, Fifa's strength is in a Xavi-esque short, quick passing game. If you’re looking to play online, Fifa will be your football sim of choice, as a strong and healthy online community ensures it's always easy to find a game. 

PES 2018

Developer: KonamiRelease Date: Sep 2017Link: Official site   

While Fifa will draw in those interested in the single player story or online multiplayer, PES is my preference for local multiplayer, or when I want to sink into the signature Master League. The two games also play slightly differently, with PES leaning more towards long passes and lofted through balls for a faster paced, more frenetic game.

NBA 2K18

Developer: Visual ConceptsRelease Date: Sep 2017Link: Steam

Basketball is one of the few annual sports franchises not dominated by EA, and 2K's NBA series is one of the few that releases on PC. 2018's installment confused people by adding a strange MMO-esque hub called The Neighbourhood, but what really matters is that the slamming and jamming is as strong as ever. 

MANAGEMENT GAMES

Football Manager 2018

Developer: Sports InteractiveRelease Date: Nov 2017Link: Official site

It’s hard to overrstate the enormity of Football Manager. It is consistently one of the most popular games on Steam, its scouting network rivals real life clubs and once a player received an international call up from the wrong country because of it. It's also incredibly absorbing and fun, even more so since they added the streamlined variant Football Manager Touch. Play it with care: it is all-consuming.

Out of the Park Baseball 18 

Developer: Out of the Park DevelopmentsRelease Date: Mar 2017Link: Official site 

It's strange how few other sports have a Football Manager equivalent, but understandable that the highly stat-driven baseball is one of those that does. Out of the Park Baseball doesn't seem to change that much from year to year, but the underlying game remains an engrossing way to live out your Moneyball fantasies.

Motorsport Manager

Developer: Playsport GamesRelease Date: Nov 2016Link: Official site

Another sensible sport to adapt into a management game, Motorsport Manager is half about the strategy, half about the cars. Between races you’ll spend time improving and upgrading your vehicle, then make strategic calls like what tires to use and when to make a pit stop, but all without having to bother getting your hands dirty actually steering the thing. 

ARCADE SPORTS

Sensible World of Soccer

Developer: Sensible SoftwareRelease Date: Jan 1996Link: GOG

"I don’t like football but I did enjoy Sensible Soccer" is a thing I’ve been told by more 40-year-old game journalists than I care to count. By stripping the sport down to its essentials, SWOS finds a purity in the tick tock of precision passes. GOG only stocks Sensible World of Soccer 96/97, so expect to be stuck in the days of David Seaman and Ian Wright. 

Super Arcade Football

Developer: Out of the BitRelease Date: Early AccessLink: Official site

Super Arcade Football is built on the classic top down approach of Sensible Soccer but with some more modern touches, the most impressive being a physics defying slow motion aftertouch shot. Unlike SWOS it also works online, making it much easier to get a game against a human. 

QWOP

Developer: Bennett Foddy Release Date: Nov 2008 Link: Official site

QWOP is, in many ways, the anti-sports game. Most sports games are about using easy, accessible controls to allow anyone to simulate being a peak athlete. QWOP on the other hand uses an overly complicated control scheme to make the relatively simple act of running a 110m hurdles (yes there are hurdles, most people don’t make it far enough to realise that) astonishingly difficult and hilarious. It’s the Eddie the Eagle of sports games.

Fire Pro Wrestler

Developer: Spike ChunsoftRelease Date: Early AccessLink: Steam

Is wrestling a sport? According to Vince McMahon it’s 'sports entertainment', which is close enough for this list. Unlike the awful official WWE games, Fire Pro Wrestling World leans into the fact that wrestling is a performance, subtly pushing players to put on an entertaining match, rather than just trying to win. That, coupled with its astonishing Steam Workshop-supported character creation makes it unique among wrestling games. 

OlliOlli

Developer: Roll7Release Date: Jul 2014Link: Steam

OlliOlli's great success is in taking all the fun of older skating games like Tony Hawk and distilling them down to two dimensions. The simplicity of OlliOlli's side on approach makes it easier to learn a track while constantly embellishing your performance with tricks and flourishes.

Desert Golfing

Developer: Captain GamesRelease Date: Aug 2014Link: Official site 

I was actually surprised to find viral mobile hit Desert Golfing is available on PC, but it is, via the Windows Store (remember that?). It's a strange, minimalist game that can lulls you into an almost zen mindset. Each hole achieves a lot with a simple geometric layout. Crucially, there is no going back, so every wasted stroke is there forever.

Tennes

Developer: Jan Willem NijmanRelease Date: Nov 2012Link: Official site

Originally a bonus game for people who backed the SportsFriends Kickstarter, Tennnes is a simplified tennis game with a flexible approach to rules. The game does not mind if, for example, you jump over the net and play on the other side of the court. If you liked SportsFriends, you'll like this.

FANTASY SPORTS

Rocket League

Developer: PsyonixRelease Date: Jul 2015Link: Official site

I've had Rocket League installed on my PC for nearly two years now, and I still find myself jumping in for a quick 15 minute game every couple of weeks. The premise is simple: it’s football with rocket powered cars. What makes it work is the strange physics: the ball seems to be moving almost in slow motion, resulting in great slapstick comedy and much rage on the part of PC Gamer editor Sam Roberts. 

SportsFriends

Developer: De Gute FabrikRelease Date: Dec 2014Link: Official site

SportsFriends is a bundle of local multiplayer indie games loosely themed around sports. Hokra is a very fast, minimalist ice hockey game, BariBariBall is a blend of Super Smash Bros and volleyball, Super Pole Riders is a strange pole vaulter jousting game and Johan Sebastian Joust is a kind of full contact musical chairs played with motion controllers. What they have in common is that they’re all a amazing fun with a group of friends.

Bloodbowl 2

Developer: Cyanide ReleaseDate: Sep 2015Link: Official site

The Blood Bowl board game is as old as I am, which is testament to its enduring appeal. It is simultaneously one of the most frustrating and entertaining games I've ever played. Dice rolls are required for everything, meaning sometimes players fall over and die because they ran too fast. The digital port is solid enough, but the real charm lies in the time tested rules.

Frozen Cortex

Developer: Mode7Release Date: Feb 2015Link: Official site

Frozen Synapse's trademark interpretation of turn-based combat, where both sides plan their moves and execute them simultaneously, turns out to translate really well into sports. A paired down version of American Football featuring big stompy robots on a small pitch, Frozen Cortex excels at replicating the execution of a single play, but lacks the back and forth of larger, more fluid sports. 

Pyre

Developer: Supergiant GamesRelease Date: Jul 2017Link: Official site

Pyre is essentially an RPG with a sport instead of random battles. The story and atmosphere are the kind of strong stuff you'd expect from SuperGiant (who also made Bastion and Transistor). The sport itself can end up a little one dimensional, as attacking players can’t move without the ball, there's little point in the passing game. Still, the way in which the fiction and the sport combine is a unique delight. 

(Note: This article contains spoilers for Pyre, Transistor, and Bastion.) 

2017 is a year that has made me want to escape, preferably to a part of the wilderness where no one would show me a newspaper or a tweet ever again. Since I get cold easily and I’m not as great at hunting live animals as Far Cry would have me believe, I opted for another source of escapism: videogames. In these often scary times, Supergiant's games Pyre, Transistor, and Bastion helped me stay sane.

Pyre drew me in with its candy-colored visuals and mustachioed dog, but just like Supergiant's previous games, it explores the very questions I was trying to ignore—how to bridge the differences in opinion that threaten our peaceful lives together, where the desire for drastic change comes from, and how to act in a time when the threat of war gets casually thrown around every other day.

Freedom and faith 

Mechanically, Pyre is a sports game. In its world of exiles trapped in limbo, you direct a lovable and diverse team of misfits through 'rites', which are athletic competitions in which you fling an orb into the opposing team’s pyre. Winning rites eventually means one of your team is freed from exile. If you lose, one of your opponents goes free instead. Either outcome is valid, which releases you from the pressure of competition entirely if you let it. I could just throw a mystic basketball around a court for a few blissful hours.

Once invested in the world and its inhabitants, I got to know an imperfect society both from the perspective of those who still lived in it and those who do not. Exile in Pyre is their one-stop solution for a variety of crimes, and the reason for this harsh punishment lies in a divine prophecy that might be all based on a misunderstanding. Questioning what your characters previously took for granted can end in your team being instrumental in nothing short of a revolution. How you finish the game, even whether or not you win, is not as important to its makers as giving you something to think about.  

Supergiant writer and designer Greg Kasavin sums it up: "Pyre’s story is an exploration of the relationship between freedom and faith, and what freedom and faith mean and entail," adding that the role these forces play in the lives of many people applies in the real world across countries and cultural boundaries.

In Pyre, your role in events is passive. You can't send yourself home. Instead you play for others, and have the inexplicably strong feeling of cheering someone on from the sidelines. It’s an empathy that seems to largely be missing in those marching the streets with tiki torches, demanding solutions that benefit themselves first and others never. The crisis of faith at the centre of Pyre is also a very modern concern. Changing a belief you have held onto for a long time, religious or not, can be difficult. 

The society in Pyre seemingly works, for the most part. Many of the game’s exiles want to return to it, but that doesn’t mean it is always fair and wouldn’t benefit from diversity. Exile makes everyone outcasts, and it’s from this new position of equality that they can attempt to overhaul the system if they keep working together, challenging previously established conventions.

It's important to Kasavin to not create black-and-white stories with clearly defined villains. "I think characters are far more interesting and believable if there's something about them that you can understand or relate to," he says. "At the least, you should be able to understand why they've made the choices that they've made, even if they've made poor choices. The most frightening antagonists are the ones we can relate to in some way, and see that whatever unconscionable choices they've made may have been well-intentioned somewhere down the line."

The Process

Supergiant’s 2014 game Transistor shows this best. The virtual metropolis of Cloudbank where it's set is being slowly eaten away by a virus called the Process, and it’s implied the Process was previously used to repair and alter parts of the city by its creators and civil servants—a tool made with good intentions taken too far.

A group of such people called the Camerata feel their well-intentioned solutions going unappreciated, which leads them to drastic actions that pose a threat to the city's inhabitants. Even though they are established as antagonists, like all the characters you meet the Camerata share a strong identification with their home. It's only fear that separates you.

Transistor’s playable character, Red, is a popular singer and a muse to many. I believe the choice of occupation is deliberate. In our own "post-facts" era, faced with the fear of losing a national identity to globalization, many have started looking to public figures and national icons to help us form our opinions. But at the very beginning of Transistor, Red is silenced. She's the only one listening in a world where everybody seems to be talking.

Unlike Pyre’s team of magic basketball players, Red ultimately chooses not to try and save her home, overwhelmed by the losses she has endured. Some players have criticized this finale, but as unaccustomed to sad endings as we still are in videogames, I think this shows it‘s important to be realistic about what a sole person can accomplish and how much power we give an individual. While in Pyre you are part of a larger circle working to achieve change that includes everyone, Red is one person with the responsibility for many. Her position is not unlike that of the Camerata, who chose to destroy Cloudbank in the first place. 

Build that wall

The predicament of the Kid, the protagonist of Supergiant’s first game Bastion, is similar again. In Bastion you get to be a kind of cowboy, saddled (sorry) with the responsibility of rebuilding his world after a catastrophe wipes it out. Just like Red, the Kid has to question whether his world is worth saving. He begins this task before he knows the catastrophic event, called the Calamity, was caused by his own country and meant to end a war over territory with their neighbors.

When I ask Kasavin why despite this you don't spend most of Bastion fighting real people, he tells me it’s always important not to trivialize violence. "It's not an accident that death is not a subject taken lightly in any of our games," he explains. "It's not something I'm comfortable making light of, and if one of our games is going to have a lot of killing in it, as in Bastion, then I think it's important for the story to invite the player to be introspective about it."

How do you act when you know it was your own country that did unspeakable things to win a conflict? Bastion explores the motivations of the people caught up in this and even suggest the monsters you fight as you try to restore order may be trying to stop you to ensure past mistakes aren't repeated. In the final moments of Bastion, you can choose to turn back time or to learn from those mistakes. Both decisions will affect those around you.

Supergiant’s three games all helped me consider the role of the individual and our relationships with each other in different ways. They made me see how hard it can be to challenge your own perceptions and how this can only work if we try to stay open-minded. They made me see how the wrong decision can seem like the right thing to do and how easy running from consequences rather than accepting them can look. 

Most of all, in Supergiant's games every decision has its origin and reason. If we try to listen more, even if it’s to a story a videogame tells us rather than the next newspaper horror story, that can motivate us to try to find ways we as individuals can deal with what’s happening around us. In a time where "be nice to each other" sounds like terrible advice, this team of game makers keep unflinchingly repeating just that. 

And if that’s too heavy for you, it’s also fine just to throw a mystic basketball around a court for a while.

The voting for the Golden Joystick Awards presented with Omen by HP closes in just under three weeks (November 3rd), and before that happens, we want to see our favourites from the last 12 months get the recognition they deserve. Not to manipulate the process because we want all the PC games to win in every category, or anything, but because there are so many amazing projects nominated that we want to celebrate. 

If you vote, too, you get a free digital copy of The Best PC Games Ever, which we published earlier this year. Take a look here for more information on what's inside, but it contains a great making of feature on the All Ghillied Up mission from Call of Duty 4, retrospectives on classics like Red Alert 2, Deus Ex, Max Payne 2 and tons more. All you have to do is vote, enter your email, then you'll receive instructions on claiming this lovely-looking digital book.

There's a bunch of great PC games up for awards at the Golden Joysticks this year. Rock-hard modern classic Cuphead is up for best visual design, for example, and offbeat horror platformer Little Nightmares is deservedly nominated for best audio. The best indie game category is full of great PC titles, of course: Dream Daddy, Everything, Friday the 13th, Night In The Woods, Pyre, Slime Rancher, Stories Untold, Tacoma, Thimbleweed Park and What Remains of Edith Finch. And that's just a few of the categories. There are three eSports categories, and the best PC games category has the likes Total War: Warhammer 2, Endless Space 2, West of Loathing, PUBG, Rising Storm 2: Vietnam and a bunch more—check out the voting page and pick your favourites. 

Despite not hitting the highs of Bastion and/or Transistor, Pyre is a gorgeous and quirky RPG-meets-sports game. In reply to the "wonderful response and feedback from players around the world", developer Supergiant has launched a new mode free-of-charge. 

Named the 'True Nightwing' update, the patch introduces a new ironman-like mode that unlocks following completion of the base game. Should you already have played through, it'll unlock automatically. 

Said to "really amp up the challenge", the new mode has no Game Over state, and takes into account your choices and outcomes as the game unfolds. Supergiant outlines the specifics: 

• Base difficulty same as Heightened.
• All Titan Stars unlocked, and some must be used.
• Enlightenment required to rank up re-scaled.
• Cannot load checkpoints or restart Rites.
• Book of Rites and White Lute fully unlocked.Slugmarket inventory fully unlocked.
• Feats of Glory introduced much sooner.
• Note: Once chosen, this setting cannot be changed.

"Many of the early tutorials are skippable so you can get into the meat of the action more quickly, and develop brand-new strategies around how to outfit your exiles, and how to take on your many adversaries," so says Supergiant. "Complete the story in this mode, and earn a new Steam Achievement!" 

Pyre's True Nightwing update is live now on the game's Steam page. 

You may know Supergiant Games as the team behind the 2011 action role-player Bastion, or the equally ambitious, heartfelt and masterful Transistor three years later. You may also know the Californian outfit as the studio responsible for Pyre—a party-based RPG that promises to deliver its "biggest and most imaginative world yet" when it lands tomorrow, July 25. 

Speaking via a Reddit AMA, creative director Greg Kasavin offered a glimpse into the behind the scenes workings of the developer. "There's this massive, metal pit beneath a trapdoor in our office floor," he tells one Reddit user. "Once every three years, we send in members of our team, two at a time, in there, to fight, barefisted. Sometimes, other members of the team throw in things like 2x4s or small pointed objects. We wait until one person can no longer fight, then send in the next. It's ordered by drawing lots. Whoever is the last one standing, whatever game they want to make, we make it."

Joking aside Kasavin continues, explaining their process starts out very small and expands its ideas from there. It seems nothing is considered too minuscule and that these personalised conversations exist in lieu of formal design documents. 

"We start by talking through all of our various preoccupations, which can be anything—a gameplay idea, some bit of tech we'd like to pursue, a narrative theme, an idea for a setting," adds Kasavin. "We start looking for common ground, and more importantly we just start building. And we start to see what sticks, and how we could make more of the ideas stick together. It's an organic process. It can be slow. There's no design document and we mostly just talk through everything, one small idea at a time. That's how Bastion, Transistor, and Pyre all came about."

When Tom Marks got to grips with Pyre at PAX East last year, he found its "Oregon Trail mixed with Rocket League" makeup confusing if not interesting. When quizzed about Pyre's sport-leaning style, Kasavin was keen to underscore its role-playing lineage. 

"We prefer for Pyre to be regarded as a party-based RPG," says Kasavin when asked how he and his team wish their incoming game to be perceived. "It happens that the game's battle system can be seen as having some common ground with some sports, but really, sports can be seen as a simulation of pitched battle. 

"The main difference is that in sports, you don't just straight-up die if you fail (in most cases...), and the non-lethal nature of the competitions in Pyre was very important to us. We wanted the characters in this game to have to live through failure and deal with it, both personally and together as a group. You'll find this is core to the themes of the game—this group of characters, having to strive together through thick and thin, unable to succeed on their own."

I'm not sure I entirely follow that statement, but I'm admittedly a huge fan of both Bastion and Transistor. To this end, I'll go into Pyre with an open mind. If that's you too, you can do so as of tomorrow July 25. In the meantime, check out Wes' review.  

Supergiant's Reddit AMA can be read in full over here. 

I spent a long time staring at my screenshots of Pyre before writing a word about it, because every frame captures a pure fantasy world so creative and otherworldly I envy the minds able to bring it to such vivid life. It's the kind of art that reminds you fiction can be anything, if only you have the power to imagine it. I'm also staring at my screenshots of the Downside, the purgatory world where Pyre takes place, because my opinion of it is as confused as Pyre's own identity.

Pyre is half fantasy sport, which is never as fun as it should be, and half narrative text adventure, which drags out a narrowly focused story across more hours than either half can really support. It's exquisitely made, yet neither half lives up to its potential.

It begins with a spark of hope for a trio of exiles in the Downside, as they find me near death in the desert. Through a series of dialogue choices I define the broad strokes of my history: like them, I'm a woman exiled from the Commonwealth, with either no memory or no desire to share my past. The one thing we both soon discover is that I'm a Reader, literate in defiance of the Commonwealth's laws, and by reading a magical relic called the Book of Rites I may be able to guide us to a way out of the Downside. 

As in many visual novels, as the player I am literally the Reader. Characters address the screen directly as they share their stories or ask where we should go next. This starts with the trio of Hedwyn, a gentle, optimistic nomad; the imposing and gruff horned demon Jodariel; and dapper mustachioed dog-man Rukey Greentail, who invite you into their wagon and then ask your advice on which path through the Downside.

This setup sounds like a fantasy RPG take on The Oregon Trail, and that's what I expected at first. Hedwyn tells me life is harsh in the Downside, so surely our course through its beautiful wastes will matter. But it doesn't: most every choice of path in Pyre is binary and largely inconsequential. Within the first hour, you've essentially experienced the confines of play in Pyre. There is dialogue, and then there are the Rites, the strange fantasy combat sport that makes up Pyre's other half.

Unlike The Oregon Trail or a more traditional RPG, there is no survival mechanic, there are no quests or sidequests, no minigames, no cities to explore and really no exploration, period. Within a few hours I'd seen all of the Downside, but felt like I'd interacted with none of it.

Pyre is more visual novel than RPG, though you do assemble a party of characters as you progress. Instead of interspersing narrative sequences with puzzles, Pyre instead switches over to the Rites, a 3-on-3 competition that's basically wizard basketball. Each team's goal is to douse the opponent's pyre, which starts with a hundred hit points and takes damage as a character flings or runs the ball—orb—into its flames. There's disappointingly little connective tissue between the two modes. Most times, choosing a destination on the map just results in a minor buff or debuff to one of your party for the next round, an effect I found all but meaningless.

Larger characters like Jodariel move slowly but do more damage to the pyre. Rukey can briefly sprint at a much greater top speed, but deals less damage. Each character also has an aura around them that will 'banish' or briefly knock out the enemy if it touches them. This aura disappears while holding the orb, so winning the Rites comes down to how you use those auras offensively and defensively, and how skillfully you can avoid them by jumping or sprinting around enemies.

Building your team for the Rites is where Pyre most resembles an RPG. Each character in your party comes from one of the Downside's races, with a unique skillset and stat distribution and a simple skill tree to level up as they gain experience. Most of the races can jump and fire their aura in a straight line like an energy beam, but there are plenty of exceptions and twists on that basic setup.

One of my favorites is the slithering worm knight Sir Gilman, who's naturally the fastest member of the party. Instead of firing his aura, Gilman can detonate a trail he leaves behind him, banishing any enemies he passed in the last few seconds. Another is the Harp Pamitha, whose wings let her fly for several seconds instead of just jumping, and who can dash forward to banish any enemy in her path instead of firing her aura as a projectile.

Ability upgrades further augment these skills and change how you use them. For Gilman, I had to choose between the ability to teleport back to the starting point of his aura trail and the option to make the aura blast cover a wider radius. With Pamitha, I beelined through the skill tree to an ability that let her fly into the enemy's pyre and score without being banished—a quick and powerful way to score, because normally a character that enters the enemy's pyre has to sit out until the next point is scored.

Each character can also equip a Talisman, and those add another layer of variety to team building. Hedwyn's all-rounder stats made him a regular on my team, so I equipped him with a talisman that gave him a chance to respawn immediately after being banished. Pamitha's dash move was a powerful offensive tool but she moved around the field too slowly, so I gave her a talisman that buffed her speed. Others I frequently used gave me money for each banishment in a match, restored some of my pyre's own HP when I damaged the enemy's, and made aura blasts penetrate obstacles on the field.

Like in their last game, Transistor, Supergiant Games' designers did a great job creating a diverse array of abilities that combine and change in interesting ways over the course of the game. I love the structure and strategy of Pyre's Rites. The problem is that I never found playing them fun enough to justify how much time Pyre devotes to them.

After more than 15 hours, I never got fully comfortable managing my entire party in the Rites. You can only control one character at a time, pressing a key or a controller button to swap between them. There's just enough of a delay here, and often just enough confusion about which I'm switching to, that I rarely made use of more than one at a time. In my best moments I'd position one character in midfield so their aura was an obstacle, or pass the orb back across the map to keep it out of enemy hands. But I never felt like I could switch control quickly enough to embody a defender in a snap and stop a quick enemy from jumping into my pyre.

Rites move with the speed and fluidity of a sports game, and controlling a single character feels tactical and responsive. It's almost akin to Rocket League, hurtling towards the goal while dodging, jumping, putting on a burst of speed. The analogy could even extend to an American football game, when you make a killer pass as the quarterback and then automatically control the receiver as you spin and sprint your way to the endzone. But imagine playing one of those games where the rest of your team stands still while you control them.

It's 3-on-3 Rocket League, but the other cars idle on the field. It's 3-on-3 basketball, but two of your players stand under the basket until you bring them to life.

Pyre was designed to play this way, of course, so it's not broken, but it never feels right to me. Switching characters isn't immediate enough to allow for full use of a team—and while I'm sure there will be high-level Pyre players who prove a counterpoint, the game never demands that degree of skill. At the same time, the Rites are too fast to offer the same satisfying planning-then-execution of RPGs and turn-based strategy games that Pyre draws some inspiration from. 

I enjoyed the Rites less and less as Pyre went on, mostly because its structure simply doesn't change from the beginning. Click a location on the map; read some dialogue; play wizard soccer; repeat. That may sound reductive—after all, aren't most RPGs simply walking to a new place and fighting battles along the way?—but the lack of true exploration and side activities really hurts Pyre, as does the linearity of its story. The grind makes an already overlong campaign feel even longer.

The narrative half of Pyre is an endless stream of wonderfully written dialogue, imbuing each character with a personality magnified by simple but expressive character portraits. And while there are a few twists along the way, and some small stories that develop between characters, the trajectory of Pyre at the end is the same as it is at the beginning: you and your companions striving to complete the Rites and escape the Downside. It all plays out in a way that feels inevitable, which may be thematically appropriate for a game about destiny and mythological traditions, but doesn't make for an engaging story after a dozen hours.

Even as I was bored with the predictable arc of Pyre's story, I admired how much work it took to make my personal version of this tale work. You see, your cast of exiles can one-by-one escape the Downside, but only if you win certain Rites. As I won again and again, my party shrank, and Pyre had to account for who remained. I was left wondering how differently this tale would play out if I lost those critical Rites, and it's a testament to how much I liked these characters that my heart clenched with stress when their freedom was on the line.

In the end I loved how their stories wrapped up, which made Pyre a strange contradiction for me: I preferred the destination to the journey. And as frustrated as I was with its lack of variety, I was just as in love with its small touches. Instead of a generic 'continue' text prompt, for example, every action in the story gets its own unique bit of writing. 'Seek now your destination.' 'Journey onward.' 'Accept this, for it is done.' I didn't think there was room to innovate the 'continue' button. I was very wrong.

That creativity is what I'll remember about Pyre as I look back on it. Pyre is clearly made with great skill and great care, blending art and music and words with more confident style than most games can hope for. But for all that work, its story and its combat never really meld, and neither was ever quite as fun or varied as I wanted them to be.