Fiction for Utilitarians: Pyre

[feotakahari]

When the stars align, the Rites shall come to bear

Illuminate the signs; the exiles shall be there

All are not the same, but three shall be as one

Freedom in the flame; the end has just begun

For the crime of literacy, you have been cast down. Your place is now with the misfits and iconoclasts on the underside of the world, people who couldn’t or wouldn’t fit in with the Commonwealth’s iron laws. If you ever want to see your home again, it’s up to you to find a way out, defeat the many foes who block your way, and if you’re lucky, take down the corrupt government that sent you here in the first place.

Before Jeff Vogel sues for copyright infringement, I should mention that you do all this by playing fantasy ballgames.

Pyre has a lot on its plate, with all manner of major questions that range from “what do you do when everything you’re familiar with is ending?” to “when you’re burdened with guilt, what qualifies as true atonement?” to “what happens to a culture that seeks to eliminate any form of deviance?” I’ve seen many of these used as subject matter for an entire game, and trying to stuff them all into eight or nine hours means some of them go unanswered. But I get the impression that a lack of answers is part of the point.

The central genius of Pyre is in forcing you into an unavoidable decision, then giving you so many incompatible metrics that the choice feels paralyzing. It rapidly becomes apparent that not all of your allies will get the chance to escape, so do you free the ones you think deserve it most? Or the ones you think will be most capable of making a difference back home? What about strategy–if someone is an integral part of your team, can you justify trapping them longer in order to free more people in the future? And if a character doesn’t want to return, will you honor their wishes, or boot them out the door? I highly recommend beating the game at least once before looking up the mechanics of how the endings are determined, because the choice becomes so much more interesting when you have no idea how it will be judged.

Pyre maintains a healthy sense of ambiguity, complicating most of the ways you could defer to a higher code or avoid questioning what’s right. Some characters think the Downside’s founders were heroes who continue to watch over their people, while another character who was harmed by them has a much darker view. One character’s view of the Rites as a teaching tool for true redemption runs headlong into another’s belief that they’re cruel and unfair. Most of the antagonist factions have become twisted mockeries of the ideals they were founded on, but it’s never clear whether the problem is inherent to those values or to the people who hide behind them. But at the same time, Pyre isn’t condemnatory or dismissive towards the values it presents. It simply allows you to come to your own conclusions, and it treats your efforts to arrive at those conclusions as meaningful

If there’s a single value that Pyre unquestioningly supports, it’s diversity–of nature, of background, and of thought. The central flaw of the Commonwealth is that it exiles anyone who’s different, and the core virtue of the Nightwings is their acceptance of a wide variety of people. Characters who’ve gone astray are often dismissive, bigoted, arrogant, or holding onto petty grudges, all of which make it harder for them to value other people. This becomes one of Pyre’s other great successes–that it can join together such an eclectic band of flawed and interesting characters, make the player love them, and then use that to build its message as you try to create a world that will no longer condemn people like them.

I haven’t even touched on Pyre’s attitudes towards the difference between history and myth, its ambiguous treatment of religion, its fascination with the concept of endings … There’s a lot more going on here than I can easily summarize, and I’ve seen other posters get very different things out of it than I did. The most I can do is advise you to play it yourself and see what you find.