Day 5 — Slay The Spire: The Rogue-like Card Game We Never Knew We Wanted
Slay the Spire is an Indie deck-building rogue-like dungeon crawler game. The genre is a mouthful and an unexpected mix but it stands as one of the top games of our generation, achieving the coveted “overwhelmingly positive” rating on Steam. 97% of the 120,000 people who rated it on the platform reported having liked it and I’m sure if you tried it you would like it too. It is one of the most engaging, exciting, and all-around delightful games on the market and I will attempt to explain why it is the perfect companion for these upcoming chilly winter nights.
The game offers an exciting combination of the interlocking rules of card games like Hearthstone, and the sense of discovery and challenge found in rouge-like games where you lose everything when you die. You get to play as an adventurer trying to climb a tower one floor or act at a time, each with multiple randomly generated routes for progression. Along the paths that you take, you will come across fights against all types of creatures, merchants where you can purchase cards or relics, special events which can have positive or negative outcomes, and camps for resting to heal or upgrade your cards.
Combat is pretty basic at first as you are dealt with a hand of five from your starting deck and three points of energy with the initial choice to attack in order to whittle down your enemy or defend from incoming attacks. You fight until you win or lose, reshuffling your deck as you play.
If you win a fight you are rewarded with gold and a chance to add one of three random cards to your deck strengthening your deck for future fights. Some foes are stronger than others but you can eventually choose to fight Elites; which are strong mini-boss enemies which reward you with higher-quality cards and rare relics (these give you wild bonuses, like getting double damage on every tenth attack). The major point of this game is about making the right choices as you slowly build up your character with whatever cards and relics you are offered.
At the start of the game, you pick one of 4 distinct character classes each with their own special starting cards, card pool, and a special ability, such as healing a bit after every fight. A big part of what makes the game appealing is that each of the 4 characters has a distinct play-style and multiple ways to play within that style. The class design is masterful and every single class is viable, powerful, and extremely fun to play. Although the classes all have similar play-styles initially, as you pick up more cards, a strategy begins to form. After seeing, for example, your third poison card or self-damage card offered, you’ll start to think about playing into certain strategies. There’s a lot of fun in discovering the strategies that each class excels at.
Each character has its own gimmicks. The Silent is a “stealthy” character who focuses on using tons of shivs to attack for death by a thousand cuts, poison, or card drawing/discarding deck milling builds. The Ironclad, is a physical fighter with a focus on big hits and the ability to recover HP after each fight. He can very easily play as a powerful, strength-buffing, heavy-hitting beast, or as someone who sacrifices his own HP for powerful bonuses, or tons of other builds. The Defect is a rogue robot that can summon orbs that automatically attack or defend and can build up their power to overwhelming levels over time. The Watcher can enter multiple powerful states where their damage is doubled (or more), but they usually also take double damage. They can also focus on scrying future cards to build perfect combos and they can make the best of a leaner deck with easily achievable infinite damage combos.
Building your deck as you play isn’t new to card games, but in this game, you build over a long time, and sometimes you have to make tough decisions like not picking up a strong attack card that falls off later or picking up a weak card that synergizes with other cards that you might pick up later. This is all done in the hopes of having a strong late-game deck with no weak draws because you can easily lose to bad draws like most card games.
Relics are one of the most important parts of the game as you can build your whole deck around some of them and they give massive advantages. One such relic, regarded by most as one of the strongest, is called Snecko Eye. It causes you to draw 2 additional cards every turn and have your hand randomized in energy cost. This can be bad if all your cards end up being expensive and you can’t defend yourself. However, with this relic, you can more leniently pick up expensive cards, which are usually more impactful, or more card draw and deck shuffling cards to get through your deck quicker. With this strategy, the “downside” of the random cost becomes an upside as you can usually get more discounted cards than expensive ones.
If you manage to fight through all the acts and defeat all the bosses you will get to the Corrupt Heart of the Spire which you will tickle with a bit of damage as the game ends leaving you wondering if that was supposed to be a boss. Sure enough, after beating the game with 3 different classes, if you manage to collect the required keys in a single run, you will unlock the hidden final act and fight the Heat at the end of your run. It is a very powerful boss with a ton of health, abilities, and buffs it gains throughout the fight, and it gets increasingly powerful such that killing it quickly can be key to winning the fight.
After you finish the game the first time with a class, you end up back at the start of the game but this time you’ve unlocked the Ascension mode. This may as well be called the real beginning of the game because after a while, you can master the best strategies and the base game becomes a cakewalk. The Ascension however introduces a ladder type of system with 20 levels where you get to replay the game with modifiers which become increasingly difficult.
The mode can be quite challenging with modifiers like tougher enemies, less health on your character, more expensive cards, and the final level which has you go through two whole bosses instead of one. The mode adds a nice challenge to an already awesome game and that coupled with the randomly generated levels which are never the same, contributes to the amazing replayability of the game.
The game itself is exciting and addictive and definitely worth checking out. It can be challenging at first but stick with it and you can easily see yourself investing hundreds of hours into this gem of a game.
