Wild Experimentation in Slay the Spire
(This is partially a companion piece to New Beginnings and Nowhere Prophet, but can be read alone.)
I have been playing an awful lot of Slay the Spire recently. It’s… very addictive. But more than that, it makes you feel like you’re good at the game - even before you really know what you’re doing.
In a lot of ways, I don’t know what I’m doing with this game. I have nearly a hundred hours in it and for as much as I’ve learnt, it’s obvious that the game goes far deeper than that. But then, I think it introduces itself to beginners particularly well.
Slay the Spire sees you progress through a series of battles and boss fights, building on your starting deck with cards you pick up from victories. In contrast to Nowhere Prophet, which can be initially punishing but is up front about the potential of its systems to bring you back, Slay the Spire initially seems to offer random but dramatic boosts of power. Hard-hitting attacks and game-changing powers are easy to come by, and make runs feel markedly changed by picking even one up.
Needless to say: it’s fun to feel powerful. It is fun to one-hit kill a tiny mook with a card that deals an absurd amount of damage, just because you can. In my first few rounds, I often found myself beating the first two bosses and getting far into the third act before falling. I even met the final boss early on - to find that was the point where the game goes ‘no, really, you need to have a smart deck’. I got crushed.
Ultimately it took me about the same time to learn and understand Nowhere Prophet enough to beat the final boss as I did with Slay the Spire, but the journeys were extremely different. In the former, the roguelike structure forced me to learn through failure, to improve so I could see what came next. In the latter, the same structure gave me freedom to experiment with absolutely wild builds, and reverse engineer what a deck ‘needs’ for next time along the way. Both are good, but the differences are interesting.
Oh, Also
To speak of more casual experiences, Dorfromantik is an upcoming “soft strategy” city builder. I’ve played the demo, and the tile matching and tiny quests tap into very satisfying bits of my brain. If you bought the itch.io Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality last year, you already have a copy of the demo ready to go!
Ruth Cassidy is a writer and self-described velcro cyborg who, when not writing about video games, is probably being emotional about musicals, mountains, or cats. Has had some bylines, in some places.
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