Slay the Spire 2
it out it out
I’ve been playing it for many hours
I love Slay the Spire and have no way to be unbiased about this.
all hail slay the spire
I beat my first run, with the Ironclad, so far, but that proved to be a stroke of incredible luck as I’ve been mostly getting my ass handed to me by the game’s wide variety of new characters and mechanics.
The Updated Engine
In a fit of pique after one of the many Unity Enshittification Announcements:
Why Unity’s New Install Fees Are Spurring Massive Backlash Among Game…
Game developers aren’t happy with a new policy from Unity that will cost developers a small fee every time someone installs a game built on Unity’s game engine.
… which have been numerous, recently - Slay the Spire 2’s lead dev threw out all of their StS2 work on Unity and rebuilt from scratch in Godot. This wasn’t as bad as it could have been - apparently, much of StS2 lives in environment-neutral C# which runs exactly the same in both environments -but I still imagine it’s probably responsible for at least some of the StS2 delay.
That being said, StS2 is going to/has already gone well enough that that represents a lot of money saved by their team.
Bouncy, Animated, and Reactive
Slay the Spire looks very much the same as it always has, but everything is a little more kinetic.
When you play a card that does a slashing attack, your character does a little slashing attack. Everything you do with a card has a lot more associated animation. Big attacks have big ones. Some cards represent allies, which is why the Silent has a little bird buddy next to her, here:
More, More, More
When I first played Slay the Spire, my first instinct was “if this game releases another character deck as DLC I will buy it immediately and they can name their price”.
So why didn’t they do that?
Well, at least reportedly, the StS engine wasn’t really prepared for it. By the time I waltzed into the fandom (late, as usual), they had been polishing the handful of main decks for years.
They hard-coded a lot of stuff, and already the game, as it stood, was brimming at the seams. The engine was not prepared for the level of flexibility that they wanted - so instead of working on More Content, their first priority was to use the time, money and attention afforded to them by the wild success of Slay the Spire to rebuild the whole engine from the ground up, but this time with the kind of flexibility and extensibility that would allow them to build and build and build and build on that core.
Which is where we’re at, now, with StS: 2, a game that feels near identical to Slay the Spire 1… but more. There’s more cards, more decks, more enemies, more events, more mechanics, more relics, more everything.
That flexible new engine at the heart of StS: 2 was probably why it was possible for the lead dev to get a build of the game stood up in Godot in a weekend.
And that’s good news for folks who just want a lot more Slay the Spire, because now that the engine is humming along, it’s quite possible that we finally will see a new regime where the devs drop a DLC pack on us every year or so to keep the game fresh.
Characterful Perks
Between Acts, instead of choosing between 3 super-powerful relics, you now get one of the gods of the spire granting you one of 3 super-powerful-boons, with different gods having different powerful options to choose from. It takes something that was already good and gives it an interesting, characterful, mechanically dense twist.
Fun Remixes
I’m just so tickled by the new monsters and bosses, because some of them are very clearly fun variations on stuff I loved from the original, and some are totally new.
Like, there’s an Act 1 elite mini-boss that’s…. a statue, that has a lot of hit points, and offers you a countdown - so now you know, that’s I guess just how statues are in the Spire:
When I fought the Act 1 “Lagavulin Matriarch”, I was excited to see a little remix of a thing I’d encountered before.
And Utterly New Things
Most of my run-ending events, though, have been disastrous encounters with the game’s nasty new tricks - with some very promising runs utterly ended by the new “knowledge demon” and “test subject” bosses.
This boss gets stronger every turn, but loses all of that strength if you get them down to 150HP - which is all well and good, unless you’re trying to build around the new “Doom” mechanic which doesn’t deal damage directly.
“Doom builds don’t work good on the big pretty stag boss” is a new learning.
There’s Not Much Wiki Yet
This game only launched days ago, so I’m flying blind, here. Hell, I can’t support half of my notes with pictures because I’ve been playing on my Steam Deck and not cataloguing as I go.
I Haven’t Fallen in Love With The New Guy
Oh, The Regent is complicated. He plays slow, too, with mechanics revolving around a summonable Galaxy Sword that he slowly upgrades until it’s useful, and a secondary energy pool that doesn’t clear or refill between turns.
I Do Like the New Gal, Though
She also plays a little slow, but her new mechanics are mostly cool - Doom is a kind of poison-but-worse - one key learning about Doom is that it kills monsters after they do damage, not like poison which can do it before they do damage. That has turned out to be a crucial distinction at least once. Doom won’t accrue damage the same way that Poison does - but if a monster ever has more Doom than they have HP? That’s it for them - after they do damage, mind you.
She also has a summonable compatriot, Osty, a giant bone-hand that protects and fights for her. Osty’s HP pool is temporary and sits in front of the Necrobinder’s - if Osty has a lot of HP, you’re in good condition.
She has a lot of effects which temporarily add keywords to other cards in her deck, which is neat - taking a powerful card and adding “repeat” or “retain” to it can be great. Once you make a very good card, she’s got commons that can bring them back into play again and again, which is helpful, although that can make it frustrating if you’ve bloated her deck too much and can’t get to your heavy hitters.
Her other major mechanic, “souls”, involve filling your deck with - well, souls, which are 0-cost cards that let you draw more cards - helping her find her heavy hitter cards.
I really like the new Necrobinder deck, although, by picking her often, her relatively weak cards and low HP pool also mean that I’ve lost as her more than anyone else so far.
The King is Dead, Long Live the King
There have been 7 years between Slay the Spire and Slay the Spire 2 - time for a great many games to have been inspired by the roguelike deckbuilder format. Balatro. Knock on the Coffin Lid. People have been mixing the format with first person shooters, tactics games, a … thing with dogs, the works.
But Slay the Spire is still Slay the Spire, this is just exactly the game I loved, but more, and better.