Slay the Spire
One of the most elegantly designed games in recent memory.
The 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.
Slay the Spire’s achievement is the way it makes this feeling of power simultaneously so potent and elusive. This is an intricately designed deckbuilding 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.
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. One deck type for The Silent became one of my favorites 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.
The essence of what makes a great card game is readily available here — the joy of building a machine and optimising it as much as you can.
If that isn’t enough, recently added moddability is already bringing new decks, enemies, and cards to tinker with.