i was overwhelmed by your collective emotion.

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. )

Uhhhh full spoilers under the cut in this one. I cannot contain myself and there's nowhere for it to go but the void so TO THE VOID IT MUST GO. Like I cannot stress enough how the FIRST SENTENCE under the cut is going to spoil this game. I TRULY CANNOT HOLD BACK, THIS IS NOT A "LET ME PEEK" SPOILER CUT IT IS A LAND MINE OF A SPOILER CUT. There isn't even that much under the cut it's literally just me screaming the ending and if you don't already KNOW the ending then I actually just recommend you ask me rather than reading what's behind the cut because I will spoil you in a much more narratively satisfying way. THE CUT IS FOR THE VOID AND FOR PEOPLE WHO HAVE PLAYED THE GAME. NO ONE ELSE!

The short pitch so you can decide if you want to play it or not: Transistor is a game about a woman with a fuck-off sword that talks because her boyfriend's soul is inside it. The woman does not talk because a shadowy organization stole her voice. She fights a bunch of robots about it. I AM...IN LOVE....WITH A TALKING SWORD. It's by Supergiant, the same studio that made Hades, which will become immediately apparent within the first second of gameplay because IT LOOKS JUST LIKE HADES, and it's actually very cool how you can see a lot of the bones of what eventually became Hades' combat/boon/heat systems here, but it doesn't play like Hades does in any significant way. It took me five and a half hours on Switch. The learning curve on the combat can be wonky but it's pretty forgiving (save points between every battle etc). IT'S A LOVE STORY BABY JUST SAY YES.

( you know, i never thought much of highrise. far from the water. then i found out...you lived here. )