Pyrene [Review]
Rogue-lite dungeon-crawler Pyrene is a rewarding, replayable deckbuilding experience.
Pyrene. Credit: Two Tiny Dice
French indie studio Two Tiny Dice, developers of Forward: Escape the Fold, is back with a new game. Their latest game, Pyrene, builds on the foundations of their previous title to create a fantastic rogue-lite deck-builder experience with a ton of variety and excellent replay value.
Based on Basque mythology, Pyrene tells the story of a village trying to rebuild itself and stop the demon Herensuge, who desires the destruction of their home. As you complete runs, rescue villagers, and rebuild the town’s structures, you’ll get access to new playable characters and unlock plenty of new cards and talismans that you’ll then encounter in the field. I didn’t find the game’s story remarkable, but I was so hooked on the gameplay that it didn’t matter.
Pyrene. Credit: Two Tiny Dice
Each run has at least one but up to five biomes, each with unique rules, conditions, and hazards. Each of the biomes is a multiroom dungeon with combat, shops, upgrades, and more; you open up more room types as you upgrade one of your village’s buildings. The final room of the last biome on the run will usually have a boss fight.
Each room is a grid, and your character’s card moves through it according to its own rules. Each room has a deck of monsters and items that gets laid out randomly on the grid, combined with your deck’s cards that get mixed in. After you eliminate cards from the grid, you must rest for the night for the game to deal new cards; get through enough of them, and you’ll find the altar that unlocks the room’s exit. Each night costs you rations and then life, so you’ll be motivated to eliminate as many cards as possible before resting.
Pyrene. Credit: Two Tiny Dice
Your deck comprises weapons, health, items, and sometimes familiars—some of which you can directly control if it’s part of your character’s ruleset. You move onto a card to use it or collect its resources. A weapon, for example, might do something like do a certain amount of damage to one or more random creatures on the board, or next to you, or maybe just the most powerful one. The effects are varied and provide many interesting builds and strategies. Of course, you can also just run into a monster to fight it directly by sacrificing some of your health or armor. Things get especially interesting when you build decks exploiting specific status effects.
After completing rooms, you’ll get a stat boost and a chest, rewarding you with a new card or relic. You can carry as many cards as you like, but how many are usable in your deck is determined by your endurance stat. This is important because your deck’s cards will only appear once in each room; your cards, HP, and rations will only refresh once you complete the room. Your cards aren’t dealt randomly—you get to determine the order to suit your combat style and strategy best. I had a lot of fun with this. You can put together some devastating combos.
Pyrene. Credit: Two Tiny Dice
Your choice of relics is just as important as the order of your cards. Your relics grant permanent buffs and conditional effects that augment your abilities. A relic might make particular status effects also cause immediate damage or make coins heal you. Get the right ones, and you’ll be unstoppable.
My favorite part of the game is the variety of playable characters. Each one feels unique thanks to their starting decks, relics, special abilities, and rules that completely change how you play the game. For example, the merchant can only do one point of damage at a time but has a pet mosquito that will randomly poison one creature every turn as long as it’s still alive, so it’s in your interest to build your deck around the poison status effect. His special abilities allow him to swap places with the mosquito. The mapmaker can shapeshift into a bear if she builds up enough rage, a resource only she has. Another character can teleport anywhere on the board but will be immediately attacked by any neighboring creature. As you upgrade the village, you also unlock more special abilities for each character that you can choose between to tweak your strategy. Certain buildings in the town will also let you rebalance each character’s stats.
Pyrene. Credit: Two Tiny Dice
Pyrene does a great job of making itself accessible thanks to its measured introduction of new mechanics and its well-paced tutorials that don’t dump too much information on you at once. You’ll quickly pick up Pyrene’s mechanics and strategies, and the game’s depth will never be overwhelming. The controls and base game mechanics are straightforward to understand; the complexity comes with mastering each character and biome’s unique challenges.
When you finish the game, you’ll earn a new structure that opens up challenges, two for each character. These also let you build completely custom starting decks to best face them. Before writing this review, I didn’t get to dig into these, but I look forward to throwing myself into them soon.
Pyrene. Credit: Two Tiny Dice
The game features hand-drawn card art and vibrant backgrounds for the village and biomes. Everything has black outlines with painterly coloring. Combat and card effects are accompanied by visual effects that aren’t too flashy. Pyrene’s art does the job but feels a bit flat.
I had a great time with Pyrene. I played it far later into the night than I intended—several times. I love a good dungeon-crawler, and this is a fantastic one. It puts so many twists on its gameplay that it feels far bigger than many other games of its kind, with how much work must have gone into ensuring every playable character is balanced. I’ll be putting in much more than the 9 hours I’ve already played.
Pyrene is available now on Steam.
Overall Score: 8/10
Played on: Steam Deck
