Let's Talk About: Slay the Spire

One thing I like about indie games is that they can come up with bizarre combinations you didn't even know you wanted. Look at Battle Chef Brigade, for example, a game that combines action RPG combat and match 3 puzzler with a cooking theme, sounds weird I know but it surprisingly works really well. In a day where the AAA industry is too afraid to take even a tiny step out of the proverbial box for fear of pissing off the shareholders, it's nice to know that there are still people out there trying to be innovative and create new unique experiences. Thus we have today's game, Slay the Spire, a game that combines roguelike dungeon crawling with a turn-based card game. Sounds like a weird combination but it works, really well. I haven't been able to stop playing this ever since I got it, I'm currently fighting the urge not to play it as I write this. I suppose I should explain why so let's take a look at what makes this game so good. The goal in Slay the Spire is simple, you pick a character and then travel up a large tower to slay it, hence the name. There are three stages in all, technically four but the last floor is more of an endgame thing, each stage has you travel through many floors with a boss fight to cap them off. Like any good roguelike, each stage is randomly generated so each run-through will be different though there are some constants, each stage starts with a basic enemy fight, halfway through you'll get a chest containing a relic and at the end, you'll get to a rest site where you can heal up before each boss. Even the bosses are somewhat consistent with each stage have three different types it randomly pulls from. That's the basic gist of how each game goes, most of the time you'll be battling basic enemies and collecting cards and it's in these battles that the game truly shines.

There are three characters to pick from, a fourth one just recently got added to the PC release but as I write this they haven't been added to the Switch version so I can't talk about them as of right now. Each character has a certain type of card only they can use, The Ironclad is the warrior who uses red cards and is all about doing heavy damage, The Silent is a sneaky assassin who uses green cards and emphasises crippling the opponent with debuffs and The Defect is a robot wizard who uses blue cards and uses various magical orbs they can conjure in battle. There are also colourless cards which can be used by any character but these cannot be picked up normally, you can buy them in stores but that's the only reliable way to get them. Each character plays drastically different from one another but one element of Slay the Spire that adds to its insane replay value is how each character has multiple ways they can be played. Take my favourite of the three, The Silent, for example. One type of card The Silent wields are cards that add poison to the enemy so it's possible to build a deck centring around adding massive amounts of poison damage and watching the enemy slowly die. But say that isn't your style, you want to deal damage directly, The Silent also has cards that can create shivs, which are zero cost cards that do very little damage but you can increase that damage with other cards and since you can get plenty of shivs in one turn, even getting a free one at the beginning of a turn with a power card, you can do a ton of damage in one turn from shivs alone. That's just two options to pick from but there's probably plenty more I haven't discovered yet. Like any good deck building game part of the fun is in building your deck and seeing what you can come up with, though given the roguelike nature of the game you may not get the kind of deck you want each time, the game is designed so you can still beat it without making a specialised deck but it does make the game a lot easier if you can make a deck for a specific purpose.

This is all assuming that thing go your way. Like with every other roguelike there is an element of randomness to every run which can either help you out greatly or completely ruin your run. This randomness may seem unfair, and it can be at times, but this randomness is also part of the fun. Slay the Spire is hard but every loss just spurs you to try again, then you run into something new and lose again but that only makes you want to give it another shot. Slay the Spire is addicting. The game has so much replay value, I've been playing it for weeks now and have only scratched the surface of what to do in this game. Outside of the main mode, there are the daily challenge and custom modes. Custom mode lets you customise your run with various modifiers and the daily challenge is similar but it's different every day. Even in the main mode, there are different difficulties to tackle, an unlockable fourth stage and you can add modifiers using seeds, which are cheat codes, remember those? Slay the Spire has them and you can even make your own in the custom mode. Combine that with the various unlockables each character has from new cards and unique relics for each character and you've got a game you'll want to come back to again and again. Each run in Slay the Spire may be short but the amount of stuff to play around with makes this game well worth its £20 price tag.

So if you haven't gathered by now, I really like Slay the Spire. The gameplay is simple but deep, the replay value is excellent and it's simply addicting once you get into it. If I had to complain about something it would probably be the presentation. The game looks fine enough but the battles aren't very visually interesting and the music is kind of weak. Still, this is a card game and the visuals are only there to act as a visual showcase so really I'm just nit-picking here, the presentation is fine for what it is.

Slay the Spire was a very pleasant surprise. It's easily the best original video card game on the market, it's better than most of the recent Yu-Gi-Oh games anyway. Even with how overcrowded the market is with roguelikes it manages to carve out its own unique niche. Point is, buy Slay the Spire you will not regret it. I certainly didn't, now I'm just trying to think of what other combinations we can try, perhaps a shoot-em-up/RPG/dating sim game. Or a platformer/fighting game/survival horror. I don't know but I'm looking forward to finding out.