The original Slay the Spire is one of the only games I consider a perfect game. Upon its early access release in 2017, it was incredibly influential and effectively kickstarted a new genre in the form of roguelike deckbuilders. As a person who generally doesn’t like roguelikes and has no interest in card games, it took a lot of convincing by a close friend for me to try it out. Skip to five years later, and I have over 800 hours under my belt. Moreover, it was my most played game on Steam for every single one of those years. It is just that good.
So when Slay the Spire 2 was announced, I was both excited and worried: these developers made one of my favourite games of all time, but what could they possibly do for a sequel? How could they top what was already such a complete experience? Turns out, quite a bit. The development team at Mega Crit Games was very open during the game’s development, informing the community that Slay the Spire 2 evolved from the fact that the previous game was a bit of a mess code-wise. Things worked, but it was very hard to change stuff and add new ideas, especially with the console and mobile ports using different codebases behind the scenes. Slay the Spire 2 would be a clean slate, with an updated engine, better visuals, and the chance to experiment with novel gameplay features. A way for them to create the definitive version of their game, in a format that allowed for flexibility, growth and portability.
With these expectations sitting in the back of my mind, I have been playing the sequel since it launched in early access, and there is a whole lot of new game here. As the team described in their regular newsletters, they switched to the open-source Godot engine for programming the game and hired art director Marlowe Dobbe for the visual side of things. The result runs and looks incredibly polished on all supported platforms. I have been playing on Windows, Linux, a Macbook Air and even a Steam Deck (I know, I am a bit of a tech enthusiast with more devices than fingers to count them on). Performance is stable on all devices, and the game is notably power efficient, ensuring a long playtime on battery-powered systems like laptops or handheld PCs. The new art and animations are gorgeous and give the game a cohesive and textured look. This is also aided by the much-improved sound effects, which make the varying actions you perform in the game feel tactile and responsive.
However, ignoring these admittedly eye-and-ear-popping updates, how much has changed in the core game? The simplest way to describe this is to tell you how my first run went. For the last few years, I have been playing Slay The Spire solely on the hardest difficulty available (in the game this is called Ascension 20) and mostly using my favourite character, the Ironclad. The new game has 5 characters to choose from, each with different cards and mechanics, consisting of the original three (the Ironclad, the Silent and the Defect) and two new characters (the Regent and the Necrobinder). You unlock these characters one by one, and luckily for me, everyone starts out with the Ironclad. I was looking forward to experiencing the new elements the game had to offer, confident that playing on the base difficulty (which is 20 levels lower than what I am used to) would be a cakewalk. Of course I lost the run. I tried again with the now unlocked Silent. And I failed my run even quicker.
Almost every mechanic has been changed with respect to the original game. Canonically taking place 1000 years after the adventures of the first game, all enemies are completely new, though sometimes subtly referencing older adversaries. Even though the game managed to keep the same mechanical simplicity that I love about the original, they seem to have invented hundreds of new ways for those mechanics to interact, to either reward or punish you. The flow of battles is entirely unpredictable, and certain strategies that worked perfectly in the first game now have serious problems against specific enemies. But don’t be worried; the game still allows you to become ridiculously powerful and break the game in interesting ways. For each of the 3 returning characters, I eventually won with decks that were based on synergies that are new to Slay the Spire 2, while still loyal to the core ideas behind each play style.
Where the original characters have been enriched with new cards, relics and mechanics that elegantly fit their original vision, the two totally new characters have added some wilder fresh ideas that make the game even more varied than it already was. The Regent is based around a single attack (the Sovereign Blade) that can be forged during combat to make it increasingly powerful. Moreover, he opens up access to a secondary resource (stars) during combat that does not get refilled each turn but can be saved between turns. Certain cards generate new stars while others consume them, and this allows for an interesting new method of scaling your character in long fights.
The Necromancer is a summoner, who amusingly uses an enlarged version of her trusty left hand as her summon. The hand (called Osty) can function as a living shield, but there are a myriad of ways to make it do damage too. Moreover, she also has archetypes based around card draw, a new debuff called Doom and “etherial” cards, so there are a lot of directions to explore with this heroine. I’m obsessed with playing these new characters and feel that there is still a lot of hidden depth left to uncover in both.
To top this all off, there is the unexpected addition of co-op support. I have now completed two runs with a friend, and we were both impressed by the amount of polish that went into the experience and how well it just works as a co-op game. We had multiple tense moments, complemented by some hilarious mistakes, which has made this one of our favourite games to play together in a long time.
What probably impresses me the most, though, is how well thought out all these additions feel. I have played my fair share of mods for the original game, and almost always, the new additions felt a bit forced, overly complex or evidently unbalanced. In the case of Slay the Spire 2, however, even though there is a ton of new stuff added, everything feels like a logical extension of the first game, with nothing feeling out of place or artificial. Sometimes, there is placeholder art, a strange UI quirk or a lack of lore text that reminds you that this game is still in early access. But if it starts out at this level of quality, I can barely imagine how exceptional the final release will be.
