Pirouette: A Solo Descent into Performance Horror

Pirouette by Michael Sweeney

What begins as an ordinary day on the ballet stage becomes a macabre performance for your life in Pirouette, a solo horror RPG by Michael Sweeney, also known in game design circles as InnocentGoblin.  You play a dancer trapped before “The Audience”, an amorphous eldritch entity whose hunger is sated only by your performance failures.  Every step risks injury, madness, or worse while every graceful move may bring you closer to freedom.

Who This Game Is For

• Fans of eldritch and cosmic horror

• Players with limited time

• Those who enjoy short-form journaling gameplay

Content Note: The game includes themes of psychological horror, physical injury, and bodily harm.  If you're looking for an unsettling Halloween solo experience, Pirouette delivers.

What You'll Need

• A tarot deck (any excuse to use my Fablemaker Tarot deck is a good one!)

• A block tower (often known by the brand-name Jenga)

• Some way to record your dancer's story (eg - a journal, drawings, voice recordings, interpretive dance)

My Playthroughs

Pirouette offers four difficulty modes, so I tried two. Standard Mode uses a set of seven dance moves arranged in any order before determining their successfulness.  Each move is resolved by flipping a card from a tarot deck and comparing values.  High-value moves are impressive, but far riskier.  My opener was a Queen - the dramatic Grand Jeté en Tournant.  With only one card of higher value, my dancer never had much chance to begin strong.   The kinds of mistakes you make are determined by the suit of the card drawn and failed moves deal damage based on the card difference.  The bigger the mismatch, the worse the injury (and the number of blocks you need to remove from the block tower).  Despite early setbacks, my dancer limped to escape.  He survived but would never dance again.

For my second playthrough, I chose Exhaustion Mode.  Here, you draw five dance move cards at a time, resolving them and dealing five new cards until you collapse or the block tower falls.  Honestly, I’m not sure physics or probability allow for anything but disaster, but that inevitability helped shape a more compelling story.  I played this round from the perspective of a dancer who wanted it to end; a performer who had danced for The Audience across lifetimes, desperate for a final thunderous and horrific standing ovation.  She came close, but The Audience was merely entertained.  She was "rebuilt" to dance another day.

Game Mechanic

Pirouette uses clean, straightforward mechanics: draw a card, compare numbers, follow the prompt.  The rules stay out of the way, which lets the tension and story do most of the work.  The journaling leans light, but that fits the theme.  This is the story of a single performance - a last performance - and it shouldn’t drag.  While none of my prompts pulled me into deep flashbacks, they did shape the tone of my dancers’ stories and added small but meaningful character moments between the falls and failures.

Using a tarot deck instead of standard cards is the right choice.  The Major Arcana expands the range of prompts, giving the story unexpected turns and a little extra flavor.  Drawing a card like The Tower or The Wheel of Fortune in the middle of a routine adds immediate tension, and those cards helped flesh out the story without extra effort.

The strongest mechanic, though, is the block tower.  It works as a timer, but it’s also an effective metaphor for a dancer slowly coming apart.  As blocks are pulled free and the tower becomes unstable, it mirrors what’s happening to your character with every move, every injury, every moment of strain pushing them closer to collapse.  It’s a simple device that carries a lot of emotional weight.

Final Thoughts

While there are physical copies of Pirouette available, I opted for the digital version and I feel that it was worth the $14. There is strong replay value here.  In Exhaustion Mode, I found myself considering additional playthroughs of my dancer as she returns again and again in pursuit of a standing ovation, no matter the cost.  Another play idea: build a doomed troupe, each dancer facing their own solo performance.  How do the relationships between troupe members affect the dance?  Who survives?  How does the fate of earlier dancers affect the current dancer? If I were going to mutate this into a group game, I think this is how I would do it.

Sweeney also includes a dance move cheat sheet, which is a fantastic touch.  I found it helpful, thematic, and immersive.  The game begs for a soundtrack, too.  While the crowd-funding campaign didn’t reach the stretch goal for a custom score, I found Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake and Bartók's The Miraculous Mandarin matched the game’s uncanny, tragic tone beautifully.

In the end, Pirouette is exactly what I wanted from a Halloween-season solo RPG: quick, atmospheric, and haunting.  With October already packed full of activity, I love that I can play this in under an hour yet still walk away with a story that lingers.  I’ll be returning to the stage before the month is done.