Slay the Spire has zeroed-in on this
feeling of linking cards together to
produce avalanches of damage,
defense, or utility. Plenty of games
put this domino-effect sensation at
the center of their gameplay loop, like
when you collect
enough Diablo gear to
unlock some obscene
damage multiplier, or
when you Call enough
Duty to temporarily
become a helicopter.
Slay the Spire’s
achievement is the way
it makes this feeling of
power simultaneously so potent and
elusive. This is an intricately designed
deck-building game grounded in
deliberate balance, populated by
confounding enemies, steady
rewards, and tactile decks of cards
that play like efficient, beautiful
machines of your own creation.
Slay the Spire splits its 283 cards
across three characters—The
Ironclad, The Silent, and The Defect.
The fantasy monsters that stand
between the character you pick and
the top of the spire don’t play cards of
their own. Instead they fight sort of
like a pokémon, inflicting damage,
pesky status effects, or buffing
themselves each turn. These actions
are telegraphed in advance through
the UI. The outcome of this design is
that I never feel cheated when I die;
rare for a roguelike or card game, let
alone one that intersects the two.
Simply knowing Slay the Spire’s
combos or best cards isn’t enough to
earn a win. Your willingness to
abandon your sweet deck idea when
the RNG isn’t serving up, say, loads of
lightning orb cards for the Defect
character is itself a skill. You’re
building an airplane as you fly it,from partially randomized parts,
through an FTL-style web of varied
encounters and events.CARD FU
There are moments when Slay the
Spire feels like a
turn-based fighting
game. The audio does
most of this work,
serving up expressive
sounds that convey
motion and impact in
addition to training
your brain on fine
details like status effect
triggers. The glacial crunch when my
Defect drops multiple frost orbs is ear
candy. Ditto the quintuple-tap thud
of the Silent’s Flechettes against a
lifebar, or the toxic clink of the
Bouncing Flask as it spills poison
over random enemies. One deck type
for The Silent became one of myfavorites because of the sound it
made. This ‘death by a thousand cuts’
build is all about playing as many
zero-cost attack cards as possible in
order to accumulate absurd strength
and defense bonuses through relics.
Over four or five combat rounds, your
pinpricks transform into gouging,
40-damage swings. When this deck is
in full motion, it’s a chorus of
stacking steel as a dozen shivs leave
your hand as quickly as they enter.ATTACK THE BLOCK
Slay the Spire’s playful fantasy art, on
the other hand, contributes less to
the joy of its combat. Enemies don’t
animate a whole lot, and as I battled
these monsters again and again I
found myself exclusively looking at
the cards in my hand rather than
taking in the fight. Darkest Dungeon
remains the pinnacle of this style of
art for its skull-rattling 2D combat
camerawork, and Slay the Spire might
have benefited from this kind of
cinematic flare.
One other poke I’d make—I don’t
love that blocking damage feels so
central to victory. Tracking down the
relics and cards to create ample
defence is by no means automatic,
but across all three characters,
loading up on block was the common
thread in my wins. Still, this seems
trivial compared to the genre-
bending achievement that Slay the
Spire represents.
The essence of what makes a great
card game is readily available here—
the joy of building a machine and
optimizing it as much as you can. As
is the bottomless surprise, the highs
and lows of roguelikes.
If that isn’t enough, recently
added moddability is already bringing
new decks, enemies, and cards to
tinker with.NEED TO KNOW
WHAT IS IT?
A roguelike,
singleplayer
deckbuilder
EXPECT TO PAY
$25
DEVELOPER
Mega Crit
PUBLISHER
Mega Crit
REVIEWED ON
Windows 10, Core
i7-4770K, 16GB RAM,
GeForce GTX 980 Ti
MULTIPLAYER
None
LINK
http://www.megacrit.com92
A strategically deep
deckbuilder that,
with any luck, has
spawned a brilliant,
new subgenre.VERDICTThis is an
intricately
designed
deck-building
gameT
he joy of a singleplayer card game like Slay the Spire is that
it puts absolutely and utterly brilliant broken combos within
your grasp. It feels good to deal 50 poison damage to
something. But it feels even better when you drop a series of
cards that sextuples that amount of poison, kills an enemy,
and triggers a corpse explosion that cascades splash damage to all of the
other things that are trying to kill you.ACE
SLAY THE SPIRE is one of the most elegantly designed
games in recent memory. By Evan Lahti
BOMB CARDS
Keep an eye out for these great cardsECHO FORM
THE DEFECT
Your first card of
every turn is
automatically
double-played. See
what happens when
you play two of them.ADRENALINE
THE SILENT
Free energy, free
cards. It’s is all
about momentum,
and this is a shot in
the arm to any
anaemic turn.FEED
THE IRONCLAD
Who needs defense
when you have 200
HP? Pairs with
self-damaging
cards like Offering
to great effect.REVIEW