PYRE! My last Supergiant game, and...maybe...my favorite? I don't know, it's really hard to say because while Bastion is clearly and obviously out of the running, Transistor and Pyre and Hades are all such differently constructed games with such different strengths.
-Transistor's short and it hit fucking HARD in a way that really left me reeling, so I think in an immediate sense it probably had the strongest impact. It's also somewhat inscrutable by design - you have to work to piece it together in a way you really don't with the other games, and there's a strong pull that comes with a story that doesn't offer itself up easily, assuming that the withholding is well-executed like it is here.
-Hades welcomes you in and invites you to stay for as long as you want. I spent like eighty hours on Hades and only stopped because after a month of playing it every day my wrist was noticeably starting to hurt. There is a whole-ass world here that absolutely encourages you to immerse yourself in it as much as you can, and it becomes perfectly reasonable to tell yourself "okay, I have to do a whole bunch of runs where I collect absolute garbage boons the entire time just so I can fulfill this prophecy and get a little bit closer to some other story stuff." Of all these games, I loved being in the world of Hades most.
-Pyre...all these games do something to tie story and gameplay together, so that if you want more story, you're incentivized to immerse yourself more in the gameplay and experiment more rather than just finding one thing that works and sticking to it. But I don't know that I've ever played ANYTHING that fit story and gameplay together as well as Pyre does. The story didn't hit like Transistor's, and I didn't take to the gameplay as well as I did with Hades, but the combination of the two...holy shit! I was SO fucking invested in the outcome of this game and that's all down to how it's structured.
( run fast, bite hard. we'll meet again when we're all dead. )
-Transistor's short and it hit fucking HARD in a way that really left me reeling, so I think in an immediate sense it probably had the strongest impact. It's also somewhat inscrutable by design - you have to work to piece it together in a way you really don't with the other games, and there's a strong pull that comes with a story that doesn't offer itself up easily, assuming that the withholding is well-executed like it is here.
-Hades welcomes you in and invites you to stay for as long as you want. I spent like eighty hours on Hades and only stopped because after a month of playing it every day my wrist was noticeably starting to hurt. There is a whole-ass world here that absolutely encourages you to immerse yourself in it as much as you can, and it becomes perfectly reasonable to tell yourself "okay, I have to do a whole bunch of runs where I collect absolute garbage boons the entire time just so I can fulfill this prophecy and get a little bit closer to some other story stuff." Of all these games, I loved being in the world of Hades most.
-Pyre...all these games do something to tie story and gameplay together, so that if you want more story, you're incentivized to immerse yourself more in the gameplay and experiment more rather than just finding one thing that works and sticking to it. But I don't know that I've ever played ANYTHING that fit story and gameplay together as well as Pyre does. The story didn't hit like Transistor's, and I didn't take to the gameplay as well as I did with Hades, but the combination of the two...holy shit! I was SO fucking invested in the outcome of this game and that's all down to how it's structured.
( run fast, bite hard. we'll meet again when we're all dead. )
