Slay the Spire: A Rogue-like I Like

For ages, I’ve had a love hate relationship with Rogue-like games.  I love the concept: A dungeon crawler RPG where the levels are procedurally generated, so each run is slightly different; there are one or more limited resources, often life or food, that you need to find a steady supply of; and they’re tough enough that beating them requires a combination of skill plus at least a little luck.

Problem is, I haven’t actually liked any of the Rogue-likes I’ve tried. Certainly not enough to come anywhere near to beating them.  Some, like Nethack, were too fiddly, with random arcane facts that you needed to know.  Like what creatures to eat when, or what symbol to use your blessed scroll of Genocide on, or how to polypile.  Others simply didn’t have a game format I liked at all; Dungeon of the Endless was essentially a cross between tower defence and RTS, two of my least favourite genres. FTL was a modified RTS.  Lastly, some had user interfaces so opaque I simply couldn’t be bothered to learn how to play them. I never got out of the starting area for Cogmind (it may have been in development still, so that might be unfair).

Enter Slay the Spire, a game that marries the concept I love with a genre I love: the deck builder.   The player controls a character.  That character has a deck of cards, which they use to fight monsters as they travel through the dungeon.  As with many deck builders, like Dominion, this deck starts off with simple and low quality cards.  The character acquires further cards to tailor this deck as they work their way through the dungeon.  Alternately, they can also upgrade existing cards.

The character also collects gold, which is used to buy from shop keepers, as well as potions to heal themselves or harm enemies.  Lastly, the character can find relics.  These items can change the rules of the game.  For example, one relic says that you can remove a card from your deck whenever your character rests (important for getting rid of those inferior starting cards).  Others are two edged; there are a bunch of relics that increase the energy you receive every turn to play cards; however, they each have some drawback, like inability to collect gold, or potions.

It’s still in early access on Steam, so the game is still changing.  Currently, you only have to fight your way through 3 floors to “beat” the game.  Doing so unlocks “Ascension Mode”.  Each successive run on that mode is more difficult. There are currently 15 difficulty levels of Ascension that can be unlocked for each character (2 at the time of this writing).  It’s challenging enough that I’m only up to ascension run 2.

So, what is the game play like? Each room the character enters contains enemies, or a random encounter (with some choice for the player to make).  In a fight, the character plays attack card to hurt the enemy, and block card to build up shields to defend against that turn’s attacks (any leftover block goes away next turn).  There are buffs and debuffs on both side.  Some enemies will put inert cards into your deck (themed as wounds, or slime, or dazed), to mess with the flow of your deck.

The overall flow of the game in some ways closely mirrors other Rogue-likes;  the first few fights seem easy, but you find yourself quickly running out of life.  You need to overcome the low quality deck that you start off with.  There are three ways to do that: Find new cards from killing monsters, remove low quality cards from your deck, and upgrade cards to make them better.  Even after building a deck of good cards and acquiring relics, the player should always be careful; a single bad fight can put you into an unrecoverable position.

That’s enough for a first glance.  If you like card games or dungeon crawlers, I recommend giving this a try.  I’d like to give a thank you to Andrea Davis for pointing me at the game.