Its cross between Ultimate Frisbee, dodgeball, and a magician's duel is easily the highlight of the game. It combines the mundanity of a ball-based sport with magic complications in the form of transforming arenas, flying competitors, consuming flames. Supergiant Games presents these questions through an imagined sport that's fast and riveting. Pyre looks like a standard role-playing game, but its rhythms are those of a career mode in a modern sports game. The first team to score a number of goals, thereby extinguishing the opponent's pyre, wins. One opponent can move at a time against the orb holder, in hopes of tagging the enemy, temporarily banishing them from the field. Like Ultimate Frisbee, only certain players can move at certain times in Supergiant's version, it's the orb holders who move while the rest of their team is stationary. There's a ball, a celestial orb, and each team must try to score by placing the orb, and often their bodies with it, in the opposing pyre.

Each side has three players and must defend a goal-their sacred flame, the eponymous pyre. The Rites themselves play out like a sort of mystic version of Ultimate Frisbee. It's a role both secure and terrifying you risk nothing, but everything relies on your performance. You control your allies in matches from the safety of the book. In the game, out now for PC and PlayStation 4, you play as a Reader, a being with the ability to read from the Book of Rites-and, with its magic, conduct the competition. The competitors are all exiles, criminals cast out of the civilization of the Commonwealth into the wilds of a land known as the Downside for the victors, the Rites are a ticket home from isolation, and back into society. The third game by beloved independent developer Supergiant Games ( Bastion, Transistor), Pyre is about a magical tournament of sorts called the Rites. One last match, this one with huge stakes. This is magic, but it's something else, something much simpler: it's a sport.

Prismatic light trickles down from on high as we climb and make our preparations. When we reach the top, the liberation rite will begin. We pass through the gate leading up to the summit.

Pyre game download