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Why Slay the Spire isn’t good

It's not often that a game manages to get over a 95% overwhelmingly positive rating on Steam. Slay the Spire (StS) was able to do just that and in early access no less. With close to five thousand reviews and boasting a review score to match universally acclaimed games like The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, does Slay the Spire achieve the same degree of perfection? I don't think it's a surprise to anyone to say that StS isn't at that level and still has a long way to go. Despite that, many players are enjoying the game, and it even draws thousands of viewers on Twitch.

But popularity isn't a reliable indicator of quality, and this is certainly the case with StS. The game has many problems in its current incarnation, and several of these issues are simply impossible to solve with the games current design choices. I'll be giving a brief explanation of the game's mechanics in the next several paragraphs, but after that I will be discussing exactly why StS fails to offer an experience worthy of what its review scores might indicate.

What is Slay the Spire?

Slay the Spire is a deck-building roguelite where you pick from a variety of procedurally generated paths to advance up the floors of the titular Spire. As you fight enemies, open treasure, and complete events, you gather cards, relics, gold, and potions to empower your character.

To begin, you select your character. Currently only two are available, but a third is on the way. The Ironclad and The Silent each have their own starting relic and deck. They also have a different set of cards that you can acquire throughout the game, leading to a distinct difference in playstyle between them. After character selection, you select a room to start in and begin your journey.

The types of rooms are very simple. There are ordinary fights, which will pit you against enemies in card-based combat. Should you prevail, you will get gold, the ability to add a card to your deck, and possibly a one use potion. When picking a card to add, you are given three choices, or there is the option to skip it entirely. I'll get more into the nuances of this later.

You can also fight elite enemies which give enhanced rewards and also a relic. Relics are potentially powerful items that give run-long boosts to your character. You can also find relics in chests which appear in the middle of each floor, occasionally in mystery rooms, and in the boss chest at the end of each floor. In shops, you can use your gold to buy cards, potions, relics, or remove a single card from your deck. Campfires litter the floor layout and provide much needed healing and an opportunity to upgrade cards. Lastly, there are mystery rooms which can give a large variety of events.

Combat will take up most of your time in Slay the Spire. By default, you get five cards and three energy per turn. Each card in your deck has an energy cost and an effect associated with it. Normally you discard your entire hand every turn, drawing a totally new set of cards on your next go around. Once you run out of cards in your draw pile, your discard pile is shuffled and placed back, cycling all your cards back in once more. Your goal is to damage, weaken, and eventually kill your opponents while simultaneously defending their attacks and debuffs they assault you with.

Essentially, that's all there is to know about the game. You advance room by room, gaining cards and other boons (or banes) that will affect your chances of victory. On death or victory, you gain progress to various card and relic unlocks.

What exactly is fun about this? From various reviews and other opinions, the deck-building seems to be the de facto point of interest. There are many synergies and combos to explore for each character, and the effects can be pretty spectacular. It is not that uncommon to create a deck that can play itself infinitely or to construct one that can destroy a boss with a single blow. Just looking at the game's cards can fill your head with ideas about different builds and strategies. However, the game is much more than just the cards, and these other mechanics and aspects tend to be the source of most of the game's frustration.

The Problem with Combat

Currently, the Spire is composed of three floors: each more deadly than the last. Unfortunately, the same can be said about how enjoyable each floor is. Simply put, the first floor is extremely boring unless you get a select few relics to make it interesting. You start the game with a deck of five strikes and five defends in addition to a couple special class cards. None of these do anything particularly unique besides doing damage, blocking, or applying some basic debuffs. You draw your beginning cards and have to think “what cards will be best against my enemies?” In standard TCG games like Magic or Hearthstone, oftentimes the solution to this question is not clear. You have to consider what cards you can draw, what cards your enemy has, what they might play in the future, and all manner of other considerations. In StS, this entire thought process is killed by its simple card design and the usage of intents.

Enemies in the Spire will have an icon above their head on your turn, signaling what they will do once their turn comes up. These icons are referred to as “intents” by the game, and the name is pretty appropriate. The intents go so far as to say exactly how much damage enemies intend to do. After a couple playthroughs of the game, even an average player will be able to tell exactly what action any enemy will perform on the next turn.

I'm sure many people if not all reading this have played Tic-tac-toe, but if you haven't, you might want to read about it before I continue. If I asked you to play Tic-tac-toe with me, would you? Even if you knew me quite well, you would likely only do it to humor me. Tic-tac-toe is simply not fun because it is just too simple. The optimal move is always obvious. In fact, it is so mind-numbingly simple that anybody who has any business playing StS can understand that Tic-tac-toe is also mind-numbingly boring. A sufficient level of complexity has to exist for a game to be fun, and in combat StS usually doesn't reach a high enough level to be fun.

In Slay the Spire, you will very frequently find that your turns play themselves just as obviously as Tic-Tac-Toe, and this is largely due to the intents the enemies will display. An enemy is attacking you for ten damage? Then you should play two blocks to block ten and then play an offensive card if you can. There are some scenarios where this is not the case. Your health is the ultimate resource in StS, so minimizing health loss is the measure of how well a fight went. Some enemies will buff themselves and grow stronger or make you weaker throughout the fight, meaning you may take more damage if you insist on always blocking the maximum amount. In these cases, taking a bit more damage up front to be more offensive is a wise choice, but this strategy is also fairly obvious. Once you have fought all the enemies, you will know the rate at which they get stronger and can plan accordingly. Even without the intents being shown, eventually the enemies' patterns will become ingrained in your mind, and then you will be able to predict their turns even further in advance.

Many roguelites suffer from a similar problem. The beginning is often too easy due to having simple enemies and not enough resources to perform difficult or interesting actions. StS takes this to a new level though as the enemies are so predictable, as is the way you interact with them. Playing cards is just not satisfying. The animations and sounds are basic, and there is no real skill involved in dragging a card over an enemy to attack them. The cards are straightforward, and so the game does an excellent job presenting information to the player. However, this makes the actual strategy of playing the cards trivial. Even well into the end game of StS, the act of playing a card is boring mechanically, visually, and audibly. Combine this with the mostly obvious turn orders, and you will quickly grow tired of combat.

I'm sure people will argue with me on this, so I will try to address some counter-arguments now. I don't think anyone can argue playing cards is mechanically difficult in a meaningful way. In terms of visual and audio effects, there is always a matter of taste involved. The animations and sounds are simple but done well. Obviously, Mega Crit Games can alter/add effects since the game is still in development, and they have. They just recently added a fast mode to speed up animations which makes slogging through the boring combat go significantly more quickly.

Many players will also probably disagree on what exactly constitutes an obvious turn. Even professional TCG players make mistakes in StS, but many of these errors are just from playing to quickly trying to rush through the game's combat. The main source of actual reasonable errors is from effects that draw cards. IF your hand does not have card draw, the hand will nearly always play itself optimally, and quite simply at that. Most cards will either do damage, buff yourself, debuff enemies, or block damage. Your health is very precious, so you always want to end a fight with the most health possible. You gain nothing from finishing the fight faster (the only exception being thieves which will flee with your money if you take too long). The only complexity in the decision of what you play is whether or not the enemies can outpace you. In an effort to not make this an hour long read, I will not spell out every possible way enemies can outpace you, but if you play the game or watch it, you will soon find out. The rate at which enemies surpass you is predictable due to their intents and patterns. IF you can draw cards, planning your turn becomes much harder, and this is the cause of essentially all complexity in combat. As I will explain later, drawing extra cards each turn is integral to making your deck grow in power, so almost every deck will have some form of card draw. Even drawing cards can be a very simple decision though. For example, you might have a hand full of blocking cards, but the enemies are not attacking. Therefore, you want to draw cards that have some other effects. With some decks, drawing is easy. You may constantly be digging for a specific powerful card that is the lynch-pin of your deck, thereby incentivizing always drawing if you can play this crucial card. Other decks might draw to try and fill their hand before playing a card that buffs their entire hand. A deck with draw is not necessarily a complicated deck.

Anybody with basic arithmetic knowledge will be able to play the majority of turns. I actually took a tally of several runs I played, and I found that usually at least half of my turns had a clear and optimal play. It's possible I make decks that are straightforward, so for those of you who own the game, feel free to track it yourself and see what results you get. You might get something different, but probably not by much.

The simplicity of the enemies as well as their predictability combine with the basic card functionality to create a very simple and unrewarding combat experience.

The Problem with Deck-Building

So, combat is fairly boring, but what about deck-building? In fact, the game's deck-building is its most lauded feature looking at the Steam reviews. With over a hundred relics and even more cards, Slay the Spire already has a large number of tools to change how you play each run. You will almost never end the game with the exact same set-up. Furthermore, each card is quite unique. Once you get an idea of what's available to you, a huge array of possibilities unfolds before you. It's unfortunate that the game does not allow you to explore these different paths reliably.

There are a decent number of ways to get relics and cards in Slay the Spire, but all of them are random. This makes it difficult to make a deck because getting certain cards or relics is not guaranteed. Even worse, you do not know when you will get them. Suppose I get a really interesting relic, but I get it on the final third floor. That means I have only one floor or less to make my deck work with it well. This is incredibly problematic because of a number of reasons, which I will discuss in the following paragraphs.

Firstly, you cannot know what cards you will get until you get them. When drafting decks in other card games, you will usually be able to select your entire deck at once. In StS, you draft the entire deck piece by piece. After each battle, you will get a choice of one card between three, and you can also buy cards at shops with gold obtained through combat and events. Already there is a problem. Because you do not know what cards you will get later, picking the wrong card early is a liability. Since your deck reshuffles when you run out of cards, any bad card will just be taking up space permanently, preventing you from drawing your good cards unless you can remove it. Removing cards is very costly. Some special events can remove cards, but mostly you are going to spend a lot of gold to remove cards at shops. There are only so many shops though, and constantly paying to remove cards prevents you from buying all sorts of other tools. You can get cards that will exhaust your bad ones, effectively removing them from the current combat. However, you still have to draw the bad cards once and have the necessary cards to remove them in the same hand. At worst, you may fill your deck with even more bad cards, and at best you still must waste part of a turn to exhaust them.

What this means is that the best early game strategy is to pick a couple generally good cards to add to your deck. In most scenarios, you will not know what your endgame strategy is going to be at the beginning, so you pick a few good cards to make your deck better. Why is this necessary? Because you need to fight elites. Fighting elite enemies gives you more gold, better cards, and relics. These fights are what will make your deck become truly strong, and there's no reason to be making a wimpy deck. Simply put, the best way to win is to fight as many elites as you can. With the basic deck, you will struggle against elites and take a lot of damage. Gaining health back is costly and usually requires resting in the early game. Avoiding rests means you can be more aggressive in fighting elites, or you can upgrade your cards at campfires instead. You need to add some cards to your deck to make it good enough to take on elites if you want to have a good deck (and why wouldn't you want a good deck?).

Now ideally, you fight some elites and maybe get a couple rare cards and some relics. With these you can start developing a strategy that will tailor your future card and relic choices, and you are off on a grand deck-building adventure. Of course, this is not always the case, and it usually isn't. Even though you fight elites, you are not guaranteed useful cards. Simply speaking, there are a lot of garbage cards or simply neutral cards that don't lend themselves to a particular strategy. Similarly, many of the relics are either very bad (Prayer Wheel) or don't offer anything specific to your deck (see the relics that just raise max hp). Worst of all, you remember those few cards you added to make your deck decent enough to fight elites in the early game? They probably don't all fit your strategy and now are just mediocre additions that overall will make your deck worse. Good luck removing those when you probably still have several strikes and defends that are even worse.

But inevitably, you will fight the first boss. Assuming you've picked up a couple decent cards and gotten some relics from elites, you should be able to win. This guarantees a rare card as well as a boss relic. Boss relics can be very powerful, giving you extra energy per turn or some other powerful ability. By this point, you probably have a feel for your deck and what you should get in the future. Immediately, several cards and relics come to mind, and you add them to your mental wish list.

The second and third floors are where the game gets an opportunity to be more than an arithmetic simulator. You now hopefully have a more well-defined play style that influences what cards and relics you are gunning for and how you play your hand. Enemies get tougher and have some more unique effects, so you will probably start to lose here on your first couple runs if you aren't used to building decks. Even still, the turns are usually straightforward. The enemies seem strange and difficult at first until you realize their attacks and mechanics. Then fighting them becomes the same as before: figuring out what their intents say they are going to do, and what your hand can do to get you out ahead. Most cards and relics still do simple things. The relic Vajra gives you one strength, and Storm of Steel discards your hand and replaces it with zero energy shivs to attack with. Yes, there are some truly strange relics that shift the value propositions significantly. Snecko Eye is one such relic that randomizes the energy cost of cards you draw. It makes high cost cards much more valuable and low cost cards worse. While this does turn the game on its head, you just need to adopt a slightly altered perspective to realize that it doesn't change much at all. You still want to achieve the same goals in combat. It's just the card values fluctuate proportionally to their energy cost, and you have to factor that in. In fact, Snecko Eye can make turns trivial when things are all either free or very expensive. The relics and cards you get do not really do anything different in the end. It's all just an arithmetic game to figure out how much damage you can do while minimizing health loss.

For example, let's look at some Ironclad cards. A basic Strike card does six damage to an enemy for one energy. Another common attack is Cleave, which does seven damage to all enemies for one energy. Obviously, Cleave is better against single targets and against multiple, unless there is some downside to hitting enemies (which there is sometimes, but again it is very obvious when this is). So in almost all scenarios, if you draw a Cleave and a Strike, you're going to be playing a Cleave. It all boils down to which number is bigger. Only drawing cards can disrupt this hierarchy as I've said before.

The real joy of playing the game on these later floors is finding those cards and relics that take your deck to the next level. If you are playing a poison deck, you may be looking for the rare card Corpse Explosion to deal some powerful area damage. If you are playing many attacks per turn, you could look for the relic Shuriken, which increases your strength when you play three attacks in a turn. So many cards and relics flit through your mind as you imagine what could be. It's unfortunate that you have little agency in actually fulfilling those fantasies.

The cards you want most are usually rare or at least uncommon. I frequently go five or more runs not seeing some cards. I unlocked the Entrench card several runs ago, and I didn't see it until just recently even though it's only an uncommon card. Relics are hard to come by as well. Often you can only buy one good relic per floor, and the rest are random drops from elites. I have only once found myself with every relic I really wanted, and that was due to extraordinary circumstances (I started with Black Star, fought two to three elites per floor, and also got the Shovel early, so I had almost every non-boss relic in the game). Even if you do get all the sweet cards and relics you could want, your deck will still probably never be the best it can be because you have a bunch of garbage cards from the early game clogging up your deck. Removing all of them is not possible unless you specifically get the relic Peace Pipe, which allows you to remove cards at campfires. But if you want to remove your cards at campfires, you have to probably skip other sweet stuff like elites or shops, making your deck worse than it could be anyway.

You will never be able to make a “perfect” deck because of this. The only possible exception to this are decks which combo infinitely, which is technically perfect in the sense that you will win on turn one taking no damage. However, these infinite decks are as boring as pressing left click a hundred times. Congratulations, you've managed to make the combat even more boring. Yes, it's fun to do once, but making these infinite combo decks that consist of a handful of cards is just not interesting to play.

I'm not going to go into great detail about every deck archetype you can make. What I will say, is that you will struggle to be able to make it as good as you want it to be. You will struggle to remove the weak cards from your deck, you will struggle to get the key cards you want, and you will struggle to get the relics that can elevate your deck to its highest potential.

Each time you play the game is like throwing a token into a slot machine. You gamble away an hour of your time to see if you can get something good, and your definition of good will change as you play. First you will be content with winning. Then, you need to win twice in a row. Eventually, you will look to do more than win and construct either extremely powerful decks or very specific strategies. Much like a slot machine though, you will find that you hit the jackpot very infrequently. Even if you do manage to reach those lofty goals, what do you do with your amazing deck? You just steamroll the game in a somehow more boring fashion, just with bigger numbers probably. Is it really worth spending hours of your time trying to get that jackpot of a deck just to coast through the end of the game and then have to start all over? The answer to this question will probably determine if you enjoy Slay the Spire for an extended period of time. Of course your definition of a jackpot deck matters too. Every deck is just more damage or defense in the end, and personally I've long grown tired of finding just more ways to do the same thing.

The Problem with Enemy Design

Now that all that is out of the way, we will revisit the enemies and why they are simply not fun. Beyond their simple, predictable selves, there are some enemies that create a whole new level of frustration. The reason for this is that decks in Slay the Spire possess two ways to gain power. You can increase the effectiveness of your cards via relics, upgrading, and card buffing, or you can simply find a way to play more cards. Usually most decks will employ both strategies at once, but one of them tends to be more dominant. I personally like to imagine a spectrum between the two extremes. Each deck you make lies somewhere on this spectrum, and based on where it lies, the late game enemies can wreck you in an extremely unenjoyable way.

What exactly is an enjoyable way to lose? The definition can vary greatly between different genres I think, but I know of one condition that must be met. The game should not force the player to lose. The main, unifying feature of games compared to other media is the player's capacity for interaction. A game that strips this capacity away ceases to become a game. Of course, if a player causes themselves to lose and then blames the game, then they are not exactly justified. But if a player truly makes the best decisions available to them, then there should be no reasonable way for them to lose. Obviously, many games use randomness, and there usually exists a chance to be completely screwed over by the RNG. However this chance should be small enough for it to be a one time occurrence.

There are several enemies in Slay the Spire that will punish you for picking certain strategies. These strategies are not bad by any means, but merely the act of picking them can doom your run. This is obviously not good. If a player can successfully execute a good and valid strategy, why should they be punished in such way? In many other games, similar situations exist where you will have trouble trying a specific strategy. However, the key mechanic in Slay the Spire is its cards, and this is also the source of a lot of inflexibility on how the player operates. In other games, maybe you are fighting an enemy that is strong against what you have been doing, but you can swap out a weapon or alter your playstyle to still come out on top. Honestly, most games simply don't create a situation where one strategy is completely invalid like the enemy I'm about to discuss. In StS, you cannot alter your strategy mid-fight. In fact, altering your strategy at all is very difficult once you get to the third floor. You've already committed to some particular deck, and if you want to retool it, you have to remove probably ten or so cards and try to get new ones to replace them. This is simply impossible to do. You cannot alter your strategy on the fly due to the inflexibility of the card system. In this case, punishing a player's strategy that by all other accounts works is not fun as the game is essentially saying, “You picked this deck, but our RNG says you must fight this guy and lose. Sorry about that.”

I will say first off, nearly every encounter favors buffing cards in favor of playing a lot of them. This is why the Ironclad is better than the Silent in terms of win consistency. The Ironclad can buff his strength to an extreme degree, thus making every attack incredible. In fact, strength buffing is by far the most consistent way to win. While this is a general rule, it is not always true. Several enemies are pains to fight including the aptly named Nemesis, but I do want to talk about one enemy in particular.

The Time Eater is by far the most terribly designed enemy in StS, but his existence is a symptom of an underlying problem that plagues the base design of the game. The Time Eater is a final boss that has one very annoying feature: after you play twelve cards, your turn is forcibly ended and the Time Eater gains strength. Note that the twelve cards do not have to be played in a single turn. If you play eleven cards one turn, then you can only play one the next turn. In a nutshell, the Time Eater destroys decks that play a lot of not powerful cards. Remember the spectrum I talked about? The Time Eater exists as a line on that spectrum, and once your deck goes past the line towards the “play many cards” strategy, you lose. He exists to unfairly destroy a subset of decks for no particularly good reason.

Why would the developers make such an enemy and not remove it? I'm not sure why they haven't honestly, but the Time Eater provides an important feature. Namely, he serves as a limiter that actually punishes strong decks more than weak ones. The Time Eater is not that strong by default. He only becomes strong when you play too many cards, and weak decks lack the mechanisms to play a large amount of cards. I had a run as the Silent where I took zero damage on the third floor. It was easily top ten in terms of strength that I have ever had, and it played probably fifteen or so cards per turn on average. I had no very strong buffs in my deck. It was just playing a lot of good basic cards and manipulating my energy amount and hand (for those wondering, I had ice cream and just an insane amount of energy creation as well as mummified hand). However, the Time Eater did manage to kill me. This was partially due to some unluckiness as I had some bad draws, but I had bad draws before as well and still took no damage. The issue is that I could not play my hand management cards because the Time Eater would end my turn before I could utilize what I drew. There was basically nothing I could have done. Fully half my deck did nothing other than draw cards or give me energy. If I didn't play those, I lose because I would be playing a non-buffed mediocre set of cards where half of them are dead draws. I had to race the Time Eater, and I just couldn't keep up.

The Time Eater, and other such annoying enemies, exist for the reason of trying to limit the power of certain decks, namely decks that play many cards. In most scenarios, the increase in power of the player will far outstrip the enemies if the player is competent. The developers could just increase the numerical values of enemies to make fights harder (which they try to do with the ill-conceived ascension mode), but this is a foolish way to increase difficulty. In my strongest Silent decks, I can accumulate over 50 block per turn quite easily. If the enemies were buffed to be able to even approach close to that, there would be a problem since one bad draw would get you killed. Also, the Ironclad has no way to consistently put up that much per turn, meaning he would become useless. Average decks or decks from unskilled players would be slaughtered since they wouldn't be strong enough. There wouldn't even be a chance to fight. There is a limit to how difficult enemies can be numerically. If this limit is exceeded, the game becomes singularly not fun in any way. Control is wrested from you as the the game says, “Sorry, your deck isn't good enough. Please try again.”

So, in a bizarre attempt to try and make the game artificially more difficult for stronger decks, the Time Eater is created. His mechanic is designed to punish specific strong decks more than weak ones. You could imagine a similar enemy whose purpose is to punish decks on the opposite side of the spectrum, those decks that play a few hugely buffed cards. Unsurprisingly, such an enemy does already exist although he is not as ridiculously heavy-handed as the Time Eater. The Awakened One is a boss that gets strength for every power you play. Powers are one of the key ways you buff your character mid-combat, and nearly any deck will have at least a few. I had one particularly strong deck where over half the cards were powers (another mummified hand run). This run was one of my first really strong runs, and I ended up dying to the Awakened One because I had to play powers to thin my deck at the very least. If I didn't play my powers, then over half my deck would be useless, unbuffed cards.

These two bosses serve as important examples. The player has access to so many cards and relics that they easily outstrip the game's current numerical scaling. A skilled player will nearly always be able to accomplish this should they choose to. The developers cannot simply raise the enemies' numerical values to make them stronger. There is a limit to how far they can go as I said before. Even if they approach this limit, the act of doing so would invalidate many deck types along the way. So, in an attempt to challenge players who have conquered their simple game, they have created enemies designed to limit strong decks without punishing lesser decks to the same degree. Why should this even be a thing? It shouldn't obviously. Imagine playing a First-Person Shooter and being told that because you are good at shooters, you get to do less damage. This concept is just unfun, plain and simple. But even this is a bad comparison. Shooters generally have mechanics that can still make the game fun, and skilled players will use them to overcome such a handicap. Slay the Spire is so simple in its gameplay that such a thing is not possible. There is no room to outmaneuver your opponent since they are mindless patterns that tell you their every move. Your deck is so simple that it limits you. The source of your strength can become your downfall all due to fighting a specifically designed enemy meant to counter your deck. Enemies like the Time Eater should simply be removed, but this won't solve the problem of the game not being sufficiently scalable. It's not fun to play against these limiter enemies like the Time Eater, but it's also not fun to just destroy basic enemies over and over. How can this be reconciled? Well, with the current state of mechanics it can't. The way the player interacts with the world is too easy and straightforward. If you want to hinder the player, the hindrance must be just as straightforward since it too must obey the game's rules. Increasing the enemies' numbers or giving them heavy-handed mechanics like the Time Eater does not make the game more difficult in a fun way.

Early Access

For the final section, I just want to talk a bit about early access. A lot of people cut games slack because they are in early access like Slay the Spire. Of course, this is deserved to some extent. For example, the developers at Mega Crit Games have been updating animations which helps make the game look a little nicer. However, there are some aspects that cannot be changed without great difficulty.

Some things can be changed easily like art, music, small enemy tweaks, UI improvements, and other great additions like the newly done “fast mode”. However, the key things that plague this game cannot be easily changed.

I've seen a lot of discussion about adding cards to the game. This is just a bad idea unless they are talking about adding a new character with their own set of cards. Adding cards to existing characters is bad, and the developers agree with this according to an interview with Rock, Paper, Shotgun. Already, you will have trouble finding certain cards. Even common cards will sometimes elude you. Adding more cards would further dilute the card pool and make it so much more difficult to make a coherent deck. Instead of increasing the number of viable strategies, it would actually narrow it since decks that require specific enabling cards would have a difficult time finding what they need.

Ah, but we could make finding the cards you want easier! This is a sentiment I've heard a lot as well, but it's no surprise that there is already a problem. If I could choose what cards I wanted, I'd win every time. The game's difficulty is not in how you play the combat because the combat is so trivial as I've said. The probability of you winning is directly related to the strength of your deck. Making picking cards easier means that deck strength would go up. Why is this an issue? As I've mentioned, there is no good way for the game to scale to match. Increasing the difficulty of enemies numerically is frustrating, and creating bosses like the Time Eater is unfair. How else can they try to challenge the player? Simply put, they cannot. Making cards or relics easier to find does not solve the problem here. If this idea of making drafting decks easier still appeals to you, I would suggest you might simply like constructing decks. If that's the case, there are plenty of card games that let you directly construct a deck however you want to without having to deal with the randomness and time investment of Slay the Spire.

The game needs something that the current design does not offer. There are a number of things that need to be revamped to make the game good, but honestly the idea of a card-based roguelite might just be bad. Some genres or ideas are just doomed from the start. I wouldn't go so far as to say the entire genre is just bad, but there are already a lot of issues. To start off with, the game needs to rework it's base mechanics. This attack and defend system is just too simple and is the root cause of many issues in my opinion. Cards are how the player interacts with the game the most. If the cards and how you play them are so trivial in scope, how can you stop this from trivializing the player's experience?

I could talk about Slay the Spire for hours as several people have had the misfortune to experience, but I will stop here and give a small recap. The base mechanics of the game are very simple, and while this does benefit the game in terms of its clarity of information, it makes combat trivial as well. The enemies follow predictable patterns that are even directly telegraphed to you, making combat even more trivial and boring. At this point, I don't even pay attention to combat on the first floor. Building decks can be interesting, but due to the random nature of getting cards and relics, certain deck types are frustrating to build. If you want to win, prepare to make the same decks over and over with slight variations. Even if you do develop a strange and novel deck, it will probably never reach its full potential. Frankly, novelty is all the deck-building has to offer after a certain point since playing the cards themselves is so boring. After all this, you still have to worry about the annoying enemies in the game designed to unfairly punish certain deck types.

All in all, Slay the Spire serves as a brief foray into the realm of roguelite card games that quickly loses its luster due to overly simple and frustrating design choices. The brief longevity of the game is due to the endless and ultimately futile pursuit to make interesting decks and find the perfect form of them. Even if such a deck did exist, it would be wholly unsatisfying to play. Unless the base systems of the game are revamped, Slay the Spire will not be a good game.

I am beginning to wonder if single-player roguelite card games even have a capacity to be good using just card mechanics, but that is a discussion for another time. To end this article, I would just like to comment that even though I think StS is a mediocre game at best (and there is evidence to support this opinion), that does not mean people can't enjoy it. I am speaking about the quality of the game, which is not a direct indicator of how much you might like it. If you enjoy the game, then by all means continue to enjoy it.

Thanks for reading,

Water Cat

P.S.

I have a strange inkling that some people reading this will think I am just some baddy who is upset that the game beat him. While I will not say I am the best, I do win quite frequently with about a 50% winrate. Furthermore, many of my losses are just me trying to make stupid decks and failing due to the game not giving me important enablers, or I sometimes just quit the runs mid-game because they are boring. I believe I was ranked 30th or so in the world for a while with a 10 win streak as the Ironclad before I lost by knowingly playing like an idiot with the new fast mode.

For those of you who incorrectly think my arguments depend on my skill playing the game, take solace in knowing that I am good, and you can stop worrying about it.

#video games #slay the spire #card game #review #critique #criticism

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