Pyre

Pyre is Supergiant Games' third title, following Bastion and Transistor. You lead a band of exiles through ancient competitive rituals across the Downside, a mystical purgatory where condemned criminals are sent. Win the Rites and earn your freedom; lose and continue your exile — the story branches forward regardless.

The Rites themselves play as three-on-three real-time sports matches with characters carrying a celestial orb toward the opposing team's pyre to extinguish it. Each character has distinct movement abilities, throwing power, and aura ranges, and the matches reward both individual skill and team composition.

The narrative is the deeper layer. Every exile in your party has their own backstory, motivations, and arc, and your decisions about who to send back to the world above (only one exile can return per Rite victory) reshape both the surface world and the relationships in your remaining party. No game-over screen exists; both victories and losses propel the story forward in different directions.

A local two-player Versus Mode lets you replay Rite mechanics against a friend or CPU with 20+ characters to build triumvirates from. The Supergiant aesthetic — Jen Zee's painterly art, Darren Korb's score, Logan Cunningham's narration — is at full power. True Nightwing mode unlocks after the campaign for ironman-style replay.