As we talked a bit about “platypus games,” specifically Supergiant’s Pyre, I started to think about the nature of games that incorporate elements of lots of different genres. Pyre itself has elements of visual novels, sports games, “adventures,” all with dashes of inventory management and narrative. Surely, even in a game as diverse as this, there has to be one element that keeps it all together, some essence that we can understand if we boil it down to a potent sauce.
I think that Pyre’s main organizing principle is “team management,” in the sense that everything you do in the game is your way of organizing this team that you’ve found yourself in, every choice bouncing off of all the others for the purpose of (mainly) the Rites themselves. Think of it in the vein of an EA Sports game, in which you don’t play as a “player,” but the managing body of a chosen team. Pyre just gets a bit more involved in that team’s life, and the minutia of their journey.
I came to this realization when I went back to the game the other day, and remembered that the “story mode” is called a “campaign,” somehow reminding me of other sports games like FIFA or Madden. When you boil it down, Pyre is a season of a sport, in which your team travels around playing other teams, in a cohesive journey in which every little thing ultimately matters. When you hit a swampy rough patch, that doesn’t affect the player but the team, making the player’s job as the manager more difficult.
Of course, “team management” is kind of a weird category. And, funnily enough, I think that it would also apply to the game Pyre was compared to in class: Persona. (For reference, I’ve been playing Persona 4 this whole quarter, so I’ve been thinking about it a lot.) In a Persona game you also act as a sort of governing body of a team, though not playing any sports. It also incorporates visual novel aesthetics and gameplay, as well as inventory management and a constantly expanding team from which you are forced to choose your primary “players.”
So really, maybe what I’ve thought to have gotten from Pyre as a team management sim is just another illusion cast by its confounding mixture of genres. While this may frustrate the more hardcore genre-heads in the games world, perhaps the beauty of the platypus is in its endless impossibility to understand.
This was a really interesting breakdown of Pyre! It’s always nice to see an entirely different perspective. I thought of Pyre the other way around– for me, the fun of Pyre was more about the narrative and storytelling, and the sports aspect almost felt more like a mini-game. I thought of it as a visual novel first, and a team management game second. Granted, I’ve never played a “real” sports game, so I never would have picked up on some of the similarities that you pointed out.
Wow. I actually agree with this take. I suppose I was thrown off a little bit by the primacy of the Rite gameplay, but it really feels like that’s an accurate description of the genre.
I do have to say though, that it feels weird throwing such an integral part of the game to the side to make this classification. Not disagreeing, but it’s a personal thing.