Slay the Spire - Ascend a big tower and kill stuff because you can. Is responsible for the "roguelike deckbuilder" fad

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Irrational Bounty Hunter

Irrational Bounty Hunter

(insane grunting and panting)
kiwifarms.net
Joined
Mar 22, 2023
No Slay the Spire thread yet?! Well, now's as good a time as any to make one, with Slay the Spire 2 releasing into early access.

I'm normally an absolute stickler on not buying into Early Access or preorder bullshit, but after the success the first game had, I couldn't resist with this sequel. After playing it, Slay the Spire 2 feels like what Darkest Dungeon fans wanted out of Darkest Dungeon 2 (and didn't get): more of the same, but evolved, refined, and given new mechanics to play around with. I haven't had as good of a time with a new game in years.
 
I really fucking hate rng games where the strategy is literally just "erm, just roll better items:smug:"
slay the spire is fun enough with mods though, I really like a lot of the community made characters.
 
The Early Access tag is really keeping me away from this right now. Does it at least feel like a full game thats largely bug-free or is it missing a good chunk of characters and interactions? I'm curious about the multiplayer since I have a friend that likes these sort of games too.
 
mikumikumikumiku said:
The Early Access tag is really keeping me away from this right now. Does it at least feel like a full game thats largely bug-free or is it missing a good chunk of characters and interactions? I'm curious about the multiplayer since I have a friend that likes these sort of games too.
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The only thing that's super apparently missing is artwork and sound design/music. It's hard to say how different the gameplay will look when it fully releases, but every character has a full, playable kit, and each act appears to have at least as many enemies and events as before. I would call it complete enough to be a worthy early investment if you liked the first game a lot. The full release will cost more than it currently does. I haven't encountered any bugs but I won't tell you they don't exist (I haven't played the multiplayer, so if bugs exist there, I couldn't tell you about them).
 
I'm just happy to see a game made in Godot Engine doing so well. Yeah, there was that community manager (it's always them) sperging out, but seeing an open source engine being used in a game getting almost half million players brings me such joy.
 
StP 1 was super fun and that was the base game, after i started modding it became a nice downtime that i would occasionally play on break at work. I hope StP 2 its also as good and add new things and of course modding support.

Also fuck Warden, most unlucky character for me.
 
mikumikumikumiku said:
The Early Access tag is really keeping me away from this right now. Does it at least feel like a full game thats largely bug-free or is it missing a good chunk of characters and interactions? I'm curious about the multiplayer since I have a friend that likes these sort of games too.
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The game is absolutely playable in early access, right now it's bugs and balancing being shaken out. But yes, I'm having a good time. My girl the Silent is still strong. The new discard deck mechanism (Sly) is fun, poison got some new tools, as did shiv decks.
 
I really enjoyed the first one even though I have never even gotten close to beating the boss. I have no idea how you are supposed to do that. So I've never even played that character they added that you can only get after beating the game. But I had a lot of fun with the mods.
 
I have a lot of time in the original game - I've beaten A20 more than a dozen times with each character. (I haven't counted, but it seems like a reasonable low estimate)

Sequel is fun so far. The old classes are reworked in interesting ways - Ironclad does seem to hurt himself more which makes building strength easier. Silent's discard mechanic got a supercharge with her Sly cards and I love it. Permanent focus seems less common on the Defect (Defrag is a rare card now!, I haven't seen Consume in the deck) and he's inherited Ironclad's synergies with status cards. Weird. The boss energy relics seem to be entirely gone.

The Regent's a real multihitter and has a very useful skill that grants one strength for each card you play that turn which makes for some fun scaling. His X skill that hits for 5 damage per star energy you have is fun because it's not that hard to build your deck to accumulate 15+ star energy. (It does feel like the kind of build that will get harder to pull off at higher difficulties) I avoid his big sword entirely; It just feels really hard to dedicate energy to forging it (nevermind playing it). I think Necrobinder is going to open up more with more unlocks; I've made it through a few games but I don't think I have a clear view of how to make a really good deck yet. She's good at staying ahead of enemies at default difficulty but that's not going to take me very far.

Enchants and Ancient relics give a lot of opportunities to customize your deck in new ways. They can be really insane (in good and bad ways); I once had my best cards all enchanted to doubleplay which was just kind of unfair. I also had a relic that caused me to duplicate every card I added to my deck and wound up with eight curses by the end of the next act.

It's still hard to start theorycrafting since after 14 hours I'm nowhere near unlocking everything (and balance is going to be tweaked in major ways as EA goes forward). I also remember how many strategies in the original fell off once you had to start planning for act 4 - I trust the Architect will hard counter some of the more straightforward winning builds.

I'm trying to avoid streamers for the time being because I'm interested in learning things myself this time around. The game isn't as good as StS1 simply because a lot of the enemy scripts are clearly in an early draft. I expect it to get harder over time, most things are a little straightforward now, and because I think it's going to become obvious how much the new enchant and ancient mechanics weight the scale in the player's favor.

The biggest problem the game has is keyboard play - it doesn't seem possible to use the arrow keys to select your card anymore, and it still seems difficult to actually play the card with the keyboard after you've selected it. I've shifted to selecting my card with a number key and using the mouse to play it, but I had expected better support since they worked out console controls ages ago.
 
First run went exceedingly well.

Architect.png history.png stats.png
The early gamble to keep the egg instead of eating it for more max HP paid off well

I like the idea of enchanted cards and they pretty much carried the run. Inflame got Sown early on, then after the first boss I got all Strikes enchanted to cost 0 energy but become unable to be transformed or removed from the deck, which combo'd really well with Stomp, as did Byrd Swoop (I love that litte guy)
 
Sly is the best mechanic, Regent's mechanices are very strong, but have flaws by comparison.

Stars need building and spending cards, with Sly, the "discard" cards are usually good on their own, and you can also just play the sly cards, many times I have a huge combo I COULD do, but I'm left with my stars dick in my hand, or no stars.
 
I just saw an article about how Bungie's marathon is getting absolutely mogged by this game.
Also one of Regent's shitty mspaint placeholder lore bits show one of his minions caked up and shakin its ass and it's so obscene that it makes me laugh
 
This game/genre either clicks with you or it doesn't. I've "won" the first game's story mode but never did well enough to justify ascension, and have a hard time understanding it. 4chan scholars have gone into great explanations of why and how you should play but it's just never happened with me. I just don't have The Heart Of The Cards apparently.

A few people have reported the same video driver problem where it boots to a black screen on desktop which I think is funny. It sounds like 2 has more easily exploitable characters and cards already. I've always hated the artstyle.
 
Haramburger said:
This game/genre either clicks with you or it doesn't. I've "won" the first game's story mode but never did well enough to justify ascension, and have a hard time understanding it. 4chan scholars have gone into great explanations of why and how you should play but it's just never happened with me. I just don't have The Heart Of The Cards apparently.

A few people have reported the same video driver problem where it boots to a black screen on desktop which I think is funny. It sounds like 2 has more easily exploitable characters and cards already. I've always hated the artstyle.
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same reason people enjoy making Rube Goldberg machines in Magic the Gathering is why, its not hard.
 
lichen said:
I have a lot of time in the original game - I've beaten A20 more than a dozen times with each character. (I haven't counted, but it seems like a reasonable low estimate)
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Holy shit. I brute forced an A20 run on the Silent and got the achievement but it probably took me like 100 runs.

Big fan of the original game but I'm going to wait on this one a bit. The price tag is a bit much for me given it's EA and the nature of the game.
 
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