Week 3:

The wife was away for Saturday of week 3, and you know what that means? Lots of games, pizza, and beer. Going into the weekend, I knew Pyre was close to completion so that was my primary focus (review below). I also focused a lot more on Divinity OS 2 and a new game picked by the awesome Giant Bomb community (Sleeping Dogs)! Beyond that, Overwatch continues to have its hooks in me, so that is, admittedly, distracting me from putting my entire focus on the backlog games listed below.

Games Completed:

Pyre

SOME SPOILERS BELOW, YOU’VE BEEN WARNED

For a game that dips its toes into a handful of genres, some of which I would never have considered my cup of tea, I walked away from this game joyfully surprised. Between the amazing soundtrack, tantalizing art design, and a core gameplay mechanic that I ended up really digging (I mean, who can resist celestial orb b-ball!?), I was able to not only tolerate but at times enjoy the text-heavy parts of the game.

Super Giant Games do a lovely job crafting characters that are both visually and narratively engaging and these are ultimately the main draw to me from a narrative perspective. It’s often something developers fumble – creating characters I actively want to know more about. Seriously, how often do you open up the biography section within a game’s menus? I know I usually don’t. Yet each time I got that notification saying a new note was added to someone I liked, I would happily pop in, learn a bit more about them, and then carry on with my space dunking.

And boy is the space dunking fun. For those unfamiliar with Pyre’s story and gameplay, it revolves around a cast of exiles who must successfully fight their way out of Downside and back to their homelands in the Commonwealth. To do this, they must successfully compete in a ritual known as the Rites, which entails class-based heroes making sick trick shots and space dunks on an adversary’s flame (i.e the goal). Overall, it’s a really cool concept, with some really fun mechanics. It must be stated though that I think the developers at Super Giant Games do themselves a disservice in how they’ve crafted the difficulty ramp in the game. The core gameplay is a fantastic concept that offers a lot of interesting mechanics late-game, yet it stumbles in two ways. One, I rarely encountered a foe that offered any real challenge to me. In fact, the only match I lost was the final one (I’ll come back to that in just a bit). Two, they layer on the mechanics too slowly. This results in the first rounds of the Rites being too simplistic, and then, by the time some complexity is introduced, I already had a firm grasp on the AI’s patterns and was able to successfully take on any challenge they threw my way. All that being said, I can’t stress enough how fun it is to make a leaping Michael Jordan-esque jump from half court with one of your heroes to weaken your opponent’s flame.

I will admit though, I found the story repetitious and quite tedious towards the end and my interest in the soundtrack and celestial basketball could only last so long. For instance, they foreshadow the end of the Rites fairly early on in the game, and from then on the story became nothing more than a cycle of ‘play one or two rites, liberate next hero, “stars are fading even more”, wash, rinse, and repeat’. As stated in my previous blog, midway through the game some of my favorite characters had already been liberated so I felt like I was stripping away the backbone of the games story one-by-one, causing the second half to be much less engaging from a narrative standpoint.

That being said, the end of the game offered a fun surprise I did not expect. As stated earlier, I did lose one match and it ended up being the ultimate showdown in the game. For those that don’t know, Super Giant made Pyre in such a way that there are no game over screens, and to my surprise, this includes the final match. It’s an interesting decision that I thought worked really well (particularly in my scenario). As someone that was more or less steamrolling through the entire game leading up to that point, I was left with mixed emotions following my first and only defeat. Buried within that sack of sorrow were feelings of frustration with myself, pity on the teammates I let down, and respect for the one adversary that finally bested me (I won’t give away the spoiler, but it was really fitting that that team was the one team that beat me). It ended up being a really memorable experience for me, and whether intentional or not, it felt like my ending was unique from anyone else that’s played Pyre (Or maybe I’m not so unique…maybe Super Giant games built the difficulty ramp knowing many players would have the same experience I did…who knows). Either way, Super Giant capitalizes on their decision to not rely on game over screens and as a result presented me with a very intriguing twist that forced me to make a rather tough decision. It was a nice way to reward the player despite losing the match and being confronted with so many mixed feelings of defeat and despair. It’s a bold choice by Super Giant games that ended up really working out. In an ideal world, it’d be cool if all games could abandon the concept of game over, but it wouldn’t work in most genres, and let’s be honest, most developers would probably fumble the narrative forks this would introduce. So for that, good on you Super Giant for delivering on such a lofty goal.

I don’t want to drawl on for too long with this review, so I won’t get into detail on the amazing work Darren Knob did with the soundtrack. Instead, I’ll let his work speak for himself. Seriously. I’ll even do the work for you. Here’s the link. Do yourself a favor and go listen to this soundtrack…like right fucking now.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uH3Aoj1nw58

So with all that in mind, if you’ve got multiple video game itches you want to scratch all in one go, then I can easily recommend Pyre. It borrows its inspiration from so many different genres and games, and then packages it all up with amazing presentation skills on both the audio and visual front. All this in mind, there is the one standout stipulation: you have to be okay with a lot of reading, as it’s a very text-heavy game.

TLDR:

- It’s sick space basketball with a cool cast, amazing soundtrack, and good art

- The blend of genres is unique, and scratches a lot of different itches

- I found the game’s difficulty to be a bit lacking, and left me wishing it asked more from the player

- The story waivers a bit midway through the game as your cast of characters dwindles down

Overall Score:

8/10

Current Game Lineup:

Cuphead

I unfortunately did not put any time into Cuphead. I will be sure to put more time into this game next week and at the very least get through World 2 (I think I only have one or two more bosses to go).

Divinity: Original Sin 2

Oh man, Act 2 really breathers fresh life into this game. Don’t get me wrong, I LOVE Divinity, but Act 1 does got a bit grueling by the end. That final battle was quite tough, and I really felt like I had to seek out every last nook and cranny of the island to get any ounce of XP the game could offer.

Now that I’m off the ship and on a new island with so much to explore, I feel alive again. The world is my oyster, and that oyster is filled with poisonous fish, prostitutes that want to kill me, and amazing spellbooks that I’m finally experienced enough to use. I didn’t play nearly as much Divinity as I would have liked this week (I was so determined to beat Pyre), but the couple of hours I did put in really have me antsy to play more in the coming weeks.

Sleeping Dogs

Thank you Giant Bomb duders and dudettes for the amazing input on my forum poll. I received a whopping 200+ votes on which game to play next, and I was shocked to see Sleeping Dogs take such a resounding lead. So far, after an hour or two of playing, I’ve already annihilated a man’s face in a moving fan, bought a pork bun, and discovered this is the best open world Burnout game I didn’t know existed (seriously…car ramming? I love it).

I’m really intrigued to see where this game goes and am happy thus far with the Giant Bomb community’s game choice.

Thanks for those that are following and reading this thing. And even if no one is, it’s a great way to keep me focused on my backlog, and help tone my writing skills in the process. :P

Cheers and happy gaming!