Apologies if I'm starting to sound like a broken record these days, but here I am, back with another edition of "Have you heard about this cool new roguelike deckbuilder?" I swear I'll find a new/another niche one of these days, but listen, Pyrene is very cool indeed, and I lost a good hour to its free demo last week on Steam. On the surface, this might look like your typical fantasy dungeon crawler, but Pyrene has some neat tricks of its own, combining its own blend of resource gathering and roguelike citybuilding with Inscryption's number-crunching battles and a dash of Foretales' card-based exploration. And it has a lovely piano soundtrack to boot, too.
The demo begins with your village coming under attack from vicious monsters, and as local hunter Atanaia, you take it upon yourself to reunite your scattered friends and rebuild your home by venturing out on expeditions into the surrounding wilderness. The latter can be achieved by grabbing wood and coin cards from the forests, plains and mountains you'll be journeying through, but only if you manage to fend off the grids upon grids of savage-looking nasties you'll encounter along the way. A classic roguelike setup, in other words, and the more villagers you save, the more characters and deck types you'll eventually have to play with further down the line.
In its demo, though, simply keeping Atanaia alive with her five-strong deck of mostly restorative items is already quite challenging, so much so that I've yet to complete a fully successful run of it. But Pyrene does a very good job of tempting you back in for more, not least because its jaunty piano score helps to keep things light and relaxing.
Each biome consists of a series of rooms, a bit like dungeons in Cult Of The Lamb or The Binding Of Isaac, only instead of hack and slash arenas you're navigating card-based grids that are filled with monsters. Some rooms contain chests or characters that can upgrade your deck, but most live up to their "danger zone" moniker - and you'll only be able to move forward to the next part of the map by finding the room's respective Votive Altar. Naturally, that involves biffing as many monsters as you can during the day - with the difference between you and the monster's attack power gradually chipping away at your overall health - before camping out at night, and then rinsing and repeating until the Altar card makes an appearance on the board.
In the demo, the Votive Altar usually only takes between 1-3 nights to show up, but there are lots of lovely extra wrinkles that Pyrene indulges in to keep you on your toes. The first is how you move around each board, as you can only move into spaces what already have a card on them. That means no retreating into empty spaces, or moving around willy nilly. Movement must be precise and strategic, which, yep, scratches both of the puzzle and strategy lobes inside my brain. A secondary wrinkle is that leaving any monsters alive when you go to camp will award them an extra pip of health/attack power, so you'll want to plan your route around the board to maximise clearing them out, otherwise they will come back to bite you later.
Add to this the extra survival pressure of making sure you have enough reserves to camp in the first place, a constantly swelling deck of possible card combos - the number of which you're allowed in play is limited by your character's endurance level (just five, in Atanaia's case) - and an almost Grindstone-like reward bonus for killing more monsters before heading to the Altar, and Pyrene already has the makings of a great deckbuilding roguelike.
I certainly plan to spend more time with it before the demo disappears at the end of the month, so why not give it try on Steam yourself? Side note: I would have included this along with the rest of our Steam Next Fest demo recommendations, but technically it's part of last week's Quebec Games Celebration rather than Next Fest proper. Still, there's certainly no shortage of great games to sample at the moment, so make sure to give Pyrene a go as well while you're at it.
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February 06, 2024 at 01:10AM
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If Inscryption was a fantasy-themed roguelike dungeon crawler, it might look a lot like this - Rock Paper Shotgun
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