Supergiant Games' first two games, Bastion and Transistor, are isometric action games. They have very different settings and Transistor improved on the combat of Bastion, but the mechanical similarities were obvious. However, their upcoming game Pyre, due out sometime next year, is set to be an RPG revolving around a sports-like 3v3 ritual. At the heart of that strange leap is a desire to craft a story about a larger cast of characters and dealing with failure.
According to Greg Kasavin of Supergiant Games, the team enjoyed crafting the worlds of Bastion and Transistor, but realized that both games have very few characters in them. "This time around, we got excited by the idea of the player getting close to an interesting cast of characters over the course of a grand journey, and having some impact over what happened to them," he says.
"We wanted the stakes of the story to be high, but not the kind of life-or-death struggle that's there in a lot of games, so that these characters would have to recover from their losses and the game and story could move forward even if the player failed in a given moment. That way the experience could feel more true-to-life, and more about how relationships between people really are, despite the trappings of Pyre's fantasy setting."

The game casts the player as someone who has just been exiled to a barren land from which there is supposed to be no escape. They quickly get picked up by folks who say that there is...