In this review, I’m going to spend most of my time just explaining what the game is to you. That is because you probably haven’t seen anything like it before and it’s really hard to understand from someone just telling you about. My advice to you, if you’re just mildly interested by this, go find a video of it being played and see what it’s about. If you are like,”this is my jam. Why hasn’t anyone made this before?” I recommend you go and pick it up. It’s in early access and can always use the support.
Slay the Spire is a deck building dungeon crawler and if you don’t know what most of that means, you’d be in the majority. Basically, a deck builder is a game where you collect cards that do various things into a deck that you use to complete whatever the goal of the game is. The common pace that happens in a deck builder is that you start off with a set of mediocre cards and you try to get better ones while also unfortunately acquiring some bad ones until you hopefully have a refined deck that can do what you need to. The dungeon crawling aspect means that you are going into a place looking for treasure and are almost always fighting monsters to get it.
Now if you’re wondering how fighting monsters and collecting cards could possibly fit together, the answer is pretty well. There are three different types of card. There’s attacks which is what it sounds like, skills which can be anything from simply blocking to take 3 damage and draw 2 cards, and powers which are effects you play on yourself that last until the end of each combat and must be reapplied every time you enter combat. This system makes combat really interesting because it turns what would likely be something like hack and slash into something more akin to chess.
The game also has some features that make the combat ever more interesting and complicated. There are relics which act like powers except once you pick them up, they stay in affect for the rest of the run (for the most part.) There are also potions which act like a one time use card. Some of them just do damage while others can win the game for you if you play things right.
There is some lore in this game but it’s few and far between. You’ll find it by exploring ? rooms which hold chance encounters. The text in this game is great. They animate and color it making something that most players skip into something engaging to read.
I do have some gripes with the game but they are more quality of life things that I hope to see in later updates rather than anything that makes this game unenjoyable to play.
There is plenty more that I’d like to talk about but I don’t have the time here so please just go check it out for yourself if you can.
