I open Slay the Spire, pick a character, and immediately hit a wall: Neow’s Blessing. Do I want gold? A card? A random relic? It’s a simple choice that terrifies me.
It should be easy, right? Just pick whatever is best.
And it was this simple when I started playing the game. Some choices were just obvious: picking a relic is better than picking a card because I don’t have to draw it. Picking 100 gold isn’t good because it’s not a lot of money, and losing max health for a big buff was always a good downside.
Then I got hooked on the game. I got to Ascension 20, completed it with all characters while defeating the Corrupt Heart multiple times.
And now, whenever I go back with all these accomplishments and look at Neow’s Blessing choices, I think I got dumber. These choices are so much harder now.
“Ok, so if I ‘Choose a card’, I breeze past the first floors. More health for Elites, more relics, more gold, better cards. Great. But what if it’s a mid common? Or some useless uncommon? It’s dead in Act 2. It’s a curse. But I could remove it later. But that’s gold I might not even have. So why pick it? But if I don’t, I can’t go triple Elite, which means fewer relics, worse scaling, and then I need better cards later, which I didn’t get now because I passed on the card, because I was worried it was bad, but maybe it wasn’t. Maybe it is good. Maybe I should pick it.”
This is how playing Slay the Spire feels after they’ve played enough. You weigh how every choice affects you now, later, and much later. The best players like Jorbs and Baalord have way less chaotic versions of this monologue in their videos, but they also take it all into account.
This extends to every other choice in the game. Slay the Spire’s Discord server and Reddit forums have extremely complex and even diverging answers for simple questions, like “Which card should I pick here?”, which are usually followed by “please show us your map and the other cards in your deck.”
There are a bunch of ways of looking at these cards. I can look at Ironclad’s Sword Boomerang, which deals three damage to a random enemy three times, and say it’s amazing because it scales with Strength and that it sucks because it’s almost useless in fights against multiple monsters or those with Thorns.
Each player has their own approach and a different method of analyzing things. So cards that may just seem like crap for new players—like I thought they were—can actually be good.
Slay the Spire pretty much becomes a game of looking at a card for what it’s good at instead of what makes it bad.
And after 1,000 hours, you’d think I have enough experience to just look at these cards and answer the simple question: “Is this a good card?” But I can’t. It’s good, it’s bad, and it’s mid all at once because it depends.
It’s a matter of choosing your approach to the game. That’s why some players can feel so lost. And that’s why you see other players, the true veterans like Lifecoach, Jorbs and Baalord having extremely long Slay the Spire runs.
The more you play, the more you realize how complex it is.
When you look at a card and think about when it’s good or bad, you’re also thinking about the synergies it has with potions, relics, specific monsters, stats, powers, debuffs, monster buffs, the map, the shop, your deck size, and countless other details.
This complexity feels like I’m dissecting the game to its very core. Not being able to answer simple questions is what makes the game so great. If the answer is as simple as “this is good,” “this is bad,” “yes or no,” it gets boring. There would be nothing to talk about.
We already know a lot of what’s coming to Slay the Spire 2. The Mega Crit devs are sharing monthly newsletters with their community, teasing some interesting changes, such as some powerful character-specific cards becoming colorless, which means they can now be picked by any character).
But it doesn’t seem like the core of the game will change. And I love it. I hope Slay the Spire 2 is just as confusing as the first one, because the moment I can say ‘this is good, this is bad’ is when the fun ends.
The post Even with 1,000 hours in Slay the Spire I expect to be just as lost in the sequel appeared first on Destructoid.