Slay the Spire Review
A Game of Swords and Relics
I’ve been exposed to various deck-building games throughout my life. The first, Yu-Gi-Oh!, made me care about the cool monsters and the high attack numbers they had and I valued that over the actual strategy of building an unconquerable, flexible, powerful deck.
Pokémon followed suit. Why would I care about Energy cards when I have a great-looking Lucario card?
Wizard101, a free-to-play online game where you built your deck of spells suited for combat situations against enemy NPCs, was my third exposure to the genre. While I never bought into any of the passes for the game, it was still fun and satisfying to summon a Cyclops to crush my enemies with his giant hammer.
One of my college professors assigned the game Hearthstone as homework, which reignited my love of the genre but for different reasons this time. Instead of adding all the coolest monsters to my deck, I was more concerned with how I could craft something that could be used effectively in almost any situation.
I played Hearthstone on and off throughout my undergraduate college years and eventually stopped playing it altogether after the annual update made my carefully crafted deck obsolete in competitive play.
Since then, I haven’t been actively playing any deck-building games, until Slay the Spire became available for free with my PlayStation Plus membership. Normally, the game is $10 on mobile and $25 on consoles.
So, is Slay the Spire worth it?
Gameplay
At the beginning of your journey, you choose one of four classes. The first class, Ironclad, is your traditional swordsman adventurer. You’re presented with a map of a dungeon with three possible entry points, as well as given an outline on the map of all possible forks in the path leading up to the final boss confrontation.
Each room on the map, separated by a dotted line, features common trials and rest spots an adventurer would find on their overarching questline. Icons with a small scary face indicate an enemy encounter, a scary face with larger horns indicates an “Elite” enemy encounter or a mini-boss.
A bonfire serves as a rest area where you can upgrade your cards or regain a portion of health, a treasure chest icon is a room filled with a random treasure tucked away inside a chest, and a bag of coins serves as a merchant room, where you can trade your coins looted off enemies for more cards, potions, and/or relics to aid you on your journey.
My favorite rooms, however, are the Unknown rooms labeled with a question mark. It could be a regular enemy, a mini-boss, a merchant, a bonfire, or a random scenario that could earn you a new relic to carry for the rest of the journey.
At the end of each enemy encounter, players are rewarded with a bit of gold, the ability to add a new card to their deck, and sometimes, if you’re lucky, a relic. Relics are permanent items that add passive bonuses to your character for the rest of the dungeon run. For example, if you possess the Pen Nib relic, every 10th attack you perform does double damage.
Combat is carried out similarly to Wizard101 and Hearthstone, with your player having a certain amount of energy points to use your cards. You can either attack, defend, apply status effects to yourself or your opponent(s), or none of the above depending on what you draw and how much energy you have.
Unlike the previously mentioned games, however, your hand is discarded at the end of each turn. Once all your cards have been discarded, they get reshuffled together and are put back into the draw pile.
The choice to attack or defend entirely rests on you, but the game gives you hints (referred to as “Intent”) as to what your opponent(s) are about to do with icons that hover over their heads. A red sword or another weapon with an associated number means the enemy will attack you for “X” amount of damage points in the next turn, a shield means they’ll block, and other shapes could mean they’ll apply buffs, debuffs, summon another enemy or even do nothing the next turn.
One’s gut impulse is to finish off the enemies as quickly as possible using attacks exclusively, but keep in mind that health regeneration opportunities are few and far between in this game, so it’s just as important to defend yourself as it is to attack.
If you die to an enemy or boss, it’s game over. You have to start the run over again, but this time you might be given a different relic or buff to start the next run. While you’ll run into the same enemy types this time around, the relics you’ll find and the items the merchant sells keep changing, and this variety makes no two playthroughs quite the same.
Final thoughts
Slay the Spire is a great starting point for those just getting into the world of deck-building games. I’m a fan of the planning nature of the genre, and love the aspect of trying to answer questions like “Should I add this card to my deck?”, “What if I go down this path?” and “Is my gold going to the right item at this shopkeep, or should I save it for later?” during every playthrough.
The game is more than worth it for free with PlayStation Plus, and if you can’t get it for free, I’d highly recommend picking it up when it goes on sale on Steam if you play on PC.
