Slay the Spire (2019)

I will preface this by saying that I play this game a lot. The dopamine cycles are very rewarding, especially because of the absurd loops you can exploit throughout the game. Another large part of how rewarding Slay the Spire is comes from how deeply, deeply frustrating the game can be. The possibilities are wide and impersonal, playing out a savage world which destroys you until you outsmart it.

This impersonality is the crux, however, of what fails to compel me about the game. I am sure, if I were intrigued by the lore in any way, I would retain some information from the opportunities to learn about it. I have, however, spent around 400 hours in the game without developing any fondness for a single one of the characters, talkative shopkeeper included. This is because, between runs of the game, nothing changes in response to your character, choices and progression through the story. Of course, mechanics change in order to increase the difficulty, but the world doesn't develop or respond to you, the player's, continued presence. Even despite the meta subtext (which I've half-heartedly gathered from the hours upon hours of clicking through repetitive events) there is no character who speaks to you personally, comments on your stats or achievements, or retains any information about you between runs.

This may seem like a strange thing to critique in a roguelike, but in every other roguelike I've played, there is some response, some entity - some world outside the repeated runs. Slay the Spire has an entity like this, but doesn't use it to engage with the player whatsoever between runs. The complexity and detail of the gameplay is astonishing, and stands in stark contrast to the game's lack of narrative awareness. It is a little like being given a bunch of expensive toys, and being left completely alone to play with them.

I am glad that Slay the Spire has been so successful in finding an audience of people who enjoy nothing more than an unforgiving puzzle. Being one of those people, I am grateful to this game for providing something which can occupy my brain - and I'm very grateful for the game's fast mode. Still, I struggle to see what the game would lose if it had put a fractional percentage of its mechanical effort into some kind of overarching narrative progression. I still have yet to feel any sense of satisfaction upon beating the game. Perhaps, after all, this is what keeps me playing.

StS is one part card building game, one part rogue like and one part mystery game, the mystery being "what the hell is going on". Who are these nameless characters? Why is there a spire? what do all these relics do?

I really dig this game. It can be a total bastard and throw curve balls at you, while also giving you unexpected perks and many many close calls. The difference in play styles with the different characters makes the game more interesting and while frustration can run high with the Nth failure, I keep going back to try one more time, hoping to be able to prune and supplement my deck "properly, this time".

I've completed the game with the Whisperer and intend to some day do it with the other characters.

I've completed three runs so far, one with the first guy, and two with the Silent. Currently stuck on the robot.

I've tried a good deal now, and I hate rogue-lite-likes. The experience isn't growing on me. The main reason being that they, at least these turn based, card-driven ones, replace skill and practice with luck and addiction. What drives me to play is that it feels like gambling, that whole "one more run" feeling. Unlike most other games, or, you know, life, you don't improve with practice. There's very little skill. You win by having good luck. It took me forever to get through a run with The Silent. Then, I had good luck with relic drops and preserving armor and energy between turns, and won two runs in a row.

The thing with rogue-li*es is, it doesn't really matter how much work goes into it, the gimmick outweighs any gameplay they come up with. The game addicts you to come back, and no amount of practice nets you more skill, and no amount of skill improves your chances.

• Year played: 2019 and haven't stopped since
• Playtime: hundreds of hours
• Platform: PC and Switch

You can probably guess by the playtime that I really, really like this game. Even more than the number of hours I've played this game are the number of hours I've spent watching streamers play it. I'm not usually a big roguelike fan, but to me, Slay the Spire is the shining example of what I wish every roguelike was. My favorite thing about the game is that you are given all of the information for every decision. You can see the intent of every enemy in a fight, so you know whether you need to block an attack - or if you choose not to, you know exactly how much health that decision will cost you. This makes the game a series of strategic tradeoffs and management of your resources (energy, health, cards, potions, relics, and gold).

The game has four characters that all play significantly differently, and yet it's balanced well enough that no character feels more overpowered than the other three. The cards are varied and combine in interesting ways, and the relics provide unique buffs ranging from mundane to this-feels-so-brokenly-overpowered (with some relics falling into both the former and the latter category, depending on which deck you pair them with). The switch is the perfect platform for this game, it's great for pick-up-and-play or to sit down and seriously focus to climb into higher ascension levels.

I think I can't really talk enough about how much I love this game, but it's safe to say it has secured a place on my list of favorite games of all time, and I don't see myself stopping playing it any time soon.

I'll make this as short as possible because I have yet to beat the game as every character. DO NOT PLAY THIS GAME. This game is a fucking drug. I made it worse for myself by getting it on my iPad so that I can play it anywhere. In my car, in my bed at 1 AM, in the bathroom for at least 30 minutes because I died to the Act 3 boss for the millionth time. I'm hooked. I love this game. I can't get enough of it. I have the feeling of selling my iPad for $5k on eBay or even the black market because I still have [REDACTED] installed and so I can be sober. Don't be like me and don't get Slay the Spire.

FINAL RATING: STAY THE HELL AWAY FROM THIS GAME (YOU'LL GET HOOKED)

I used to have a Dominion problem. You know, Dominion, the late-2000's smash card game hit where you played a bunch of competing old-timey fancy lords trying to gather the most land and prestige? Real good game, I highly recommend it. Anyway... I used to have a problem where I always wanted to play it. It offered a randomized setup where every game seemed new, and you wound up needing to figure out how to make the best deck engine you could out of the cards available. Deck efficiency was king! Eventually though, everyone I knew who loved it moved away, and those who stayed did so only after I promised to stop trying to pull the game out at parties.

Which brings us to Slay the Spire, a game which is superior in one crucial way: I don't need traitorous friends to play it.

Slay the Spire is a bit of an unlikely concept, a one-player deck building roguelike. Two great nerdy flavors that go great together. In it, you choose one of three character archetypes - swordy shieldy person, stabby sneaky person, or broken exploding robot - and barge into a very tall Spire so that you might reach the top and Slay it. Along the way, you can fight monsters to gain gold and expand your deck, encounter random events that might gift you rare relics, open treasure chests, visit merchants, challenge elite monsters for even bigger prizes... and at the end of each portion of the Spire, you face a big bad mega boss that keeps you from progressing further. There's not too much story to it, but hell, it's a card game roguelike. If that sounded appealing to you, you weren't hoping for Dickens.

Anyway, the game is at its heart all about resource management in the face of randomized events and loot. You do have some control over how your character develops, but each run offers a different set of relics and cards for you to choose from. While each of the game's arcs always contains the same set of normal enemies, the Elites and Bosses vary, and can penalize or reward particular deck builds tremendously. But what I like about this game very much is that it doesn't feel as stuffy and number-crunching as it really is. Exploring the Spire offers atmosphere and character: some of the enemies make witty banter as you fight, and all of the random events are charming in a Baby's First D&D Campaign kinda way. And in battle, making the most of each hand you're dealt involves gambling, and creativity, and when you lay down an exploding robot combo that deals 200+ damage in a single turn, it feels good in a way Maths never should.

As soon as I acquired this puppy, I played the hell out of it for a good week, and I enjoyed pretty much every step of it. Unfortunately, my love for it faded a bit near the end. Without getting into spoilers too much, the End Game Content becomes demanding in a very un-fun sort of way. What was once a game about making the most of what the RNG gives you mutated into a game about praying the RNG doesn't shaft you into wasting the last few hours making it this far, all for naught... But it's not fair to blame it too hard for that. This is all bonus silliness that shouldn't be held against the base game, which is a right good fantasy mash-em-up if ever there was one.

Slay the Spire! It's a no-brainer, a solid, cheap noodle-scratcher that will distract you from pretty much everything else in your life for a solid week or more. You could get it on sale like I did, or hell, just pay full price. I'd say these assholes have earned it.

...Oh, and apparently you serve a giant beached whale? I don't know if that does anything for you, but it's probably worth mentioning.

My favorite part of this game was building the deck and trying out different builds. But when the build you're trying to make requires a few or even one specific card it becomes a lottery grind of restarting playthroughs over and over in the hope that you will pick up those cards early.

In short, the game doesn't let you build the deck you want but instead gives you a random selection of cards (with some leeway, given that you can select 1/3 in chests and buy cards in the shop) and asks you to make the best of it. While I'm sure there's an audience for that kind of thing (just look at Hearthstone's draft mode) it's just not for me.