Pyro Act I

Intro

Oddly enough I find myself struggling to come up with a good way to jump into this review. On one hand, I'd like to talk a bit about the developer yami, but as far as I can tell his/her only contribution to this site is basically this game. In fact, one might argue it's ironic that a game with pyro in the title was put out there by someone whose interest in this site appears to have burned out in a pretty short span of time. Though maybe yami was one of those people that liked to hang in the background and go unnoticed. After all, I've been challenged on some of my reviews in the past. So maybe they liked to avoid confrontation and the best way to do that was merely to interact with others on this site as little as possible.

I suppose this speculation really doesn't have anything to do with "Pyro Act I". An apparently simple puzzle game created with RPG Maker VX and released back in 2010 on the same day Yami joined the site, but I find myself with really little to say about "Pyro Act I" in a lot of ways since it feels more like an attempt at creating a proof of concept. Unfortunately Yami never really hammered out all of the bugs so I have more to say about the game's various glitches then I do the game's mechanics.

Story

Honestly, I have no idea what the story for this game is beyond the main character wanting to get to a volcano in order to gain access to more powerful spirits. Unfortunately the incomplete nature of this project means it's not really clear why there are stronger spirits at the volcano.

I suppose I could speculate about volcanoes being a byproduct of powerful spirits living in an area or that powerful spirits are born from displays of nature's fury. Though, I suppose speculating on stuff like this will send me down a tangent about Yami again at some point. So I should probably move onto discussing how the game works.

Gameplay

You play as Pyro, a Spiritian, whose been sealed inside of a butterfly for all intents and purposes and can summon lesser spirits to deal with your enemies. After all, you can only advance through the various stages as you take out the loyal slaves of those that would oppose you. And direct those under your command by drawing them in with the A, S, and D keys and use those same keys to summon your spirits at the start of a map.

Of course, some of the more powerful enemies can readily wipe out your own spirits or force you to make trades which can make clearing out a stage a pain in the butt. Or at least it would if it wasn't for how glitchy the game was.

You can also use items during the puzzles by pressing the Q key to pull up the menu. Of course you need money to buy items and can only get money from opening up chests and clearing stages. And some levels basically require you to use items in order to advance. Though oddly enough you can get access to an infinite amount of money in this game thanks to a glitch.

Glitches

"Pyro Act I" is a really glitchy mess in a lot of regards. For starters when your spirits are 'defeated' they can actually still be controlled and directed with the A, S, and D keys. So your spirits never truly die. They just become invisible. As a result it's pretty easy to clear any stage in this game without the aid of items. At least if were dealing with any of the stages outside of the castle where items are absolutely needed to deal with the enemies on screen.

Of course, the most interesting glitch in this game in my opinion is if you use the fast travel option in the menu to travel back to camp your given 30 gold for free. Admittedly this isn't a ton of money considering even the most basic items cost 100 gold, but you can use the quick travel option back to camp while still standing on it. So you can accumulate money fairly quickly with this trick. And considering even the most powerful items only cost 300 gold coins. It's pretty easy to find yourself decked out with more than enough items to defeat the castle level.

Though, I'd say the most annoying glitch is a sound issue that pops up whenever a chest appears on a stage. The game just starts to freak out and generate a really annoying noise that will make you beg for earplugs. Though, I suppose the fastest option would be to drop the sound output from the game down to zero.

And finally the game is sometimes helpful in that your spirit's can pass through hex fields that should instantly kill them every now and again. And I have absolutely no idea what triggers this since sometimes the traps work as intended and other times they don't do anything.

Graphics & Sound

On the graphical and sound side of things the game appears to just use standard assets from the RTP. As such the game really doesn't stand out, but the developer doesn't seem to use them in a way that is hyper annoying either.

Conclusion

"Pyro Act I" is a proof of concept that never really went anywhere as far as I'm aware. If anything my best educated guess is that Yami was never really able to hammer out all of the glitches and just gave up on this project after a while.

Admittedly I can kind of relate to that since I tried making a few games when I was a horny teenager and gave up on them in short order when I realized how much work it would be to make something that was actually decent. The sad part is the base concept here is pretty solid in my opinion, but the execution leaves a lot to be desired. That being said I really don't feel like giving this project a rating either considering it feels more like a proof of concept then an actual game to me.