Pyro Act I

Pyro Act I is an interesting little puzzle game with some weird pacing and style choices, but a fun concept. I only played for about 15 minutes and seemed to get through most of the available levels.

You're thrown into the game without a title screen, and the first thing that happens is a conversation with a butterfly. Turns out the butterfly is actually Pyro, a Spiritan God, whose mission is to destroy Oceano in battle. There's not much story here.



You battle by placing spirits on the map, and once the battle begins both spirits and enemies move automatically. Each spirit is associated with A, S, or D on the keyboard. When the spirit runs into an enemy, they destroy them, and you can use their keyboard key to draw the spirit towards you.

The main source of difficulty is how much can be happening on-screen at once -- I had a hard time determining why spirits would die aside from stepping on the pentagrams. Sometimes I'd see them die when they weren't near one and I'd have no clue why (my guess is a stronger enemy type). Some maps are large enough that you can't watch all the spirits at once, so you have to prioritize where you're looking. Once all your spirits die, you seem to have to manually restart. There's no direct gameover.

There's 6 levels you can play, 8 counting the tutorial and the first mandatory mission. During my 15ish minutes of play, I tried all of them and beat 5 of them. Although you can buy items, I wasn't able to figure out how to use them, and apparently that's what you need to beat the castle level.

When you play the ruins level there's a kind of horrible noise looping, somehow related to the treasure chest on the map. You have to sacrifice a spirit to reach it, which can safely be done after defeating all the enemies, and opening the chest stops the noise. The grassy area had the same looping noise as the ruins, which also seemed to be connected to a treasure chest that shows up towards the end of the level. My best guess is that the noise is supposed to indicate that there's treasure in the area, but it's terrible to listen to. There's not much musical variety here, and even using more of the RTP music would have helped make the battles a tad more exciting.

It's short and if you try it out, keep in mind it seems to mostly just show off the system. It might be some neat food for thought, and it's a very short game so it couldn't hurt to try.