There once was a little green, wrinkly movie puppet who said: “Do or do not, there is no try”. It is a teaching with bodacious depth, especially coming from an Einstein-esque alien space wizard. The point being, Slay the Spire – and, in fact, the entirety of the roguelike spectrum – hinges very much on this sentiment. I regale it such, as an introduction to how I have continually approached my attempt at toppling MegaCrit’s proverbial tower.
There is, mechanically, functionally, spiritually, no one way to try to slay the spire; to try and win the run. You either reach the beating heart or you don’t. You might trek along some notes, some experience of card combinations with a guaranteed victorious effect, a vision of whichever build you want to strive towards in order to Do, but at the end of all things it will still boil down to if you Did or if you Did Not.
What is Slay the Spire?
Slay the Spire was not the first roguelike game. It was not the last either. In fact, its existence – as a video game product on the shelf among many – is nothing exceptional in comparison with other video games that share its flavor. Except for its inspiration and aspirations. Video games can tend to be insular; design process, structure and play reaching no further than proven ideas in the same space. Video games begetting more video games in a closed circle, producing similarity in excess. But much like another little independent production you might have heard of, from the same year Slay the Spire went into full release, Disco Elysium, the inspiration for the avatar-driven, deckbuilding roguelike was an outsider’s perspective. Disco Elysium positioned then-Twitter as the primary source of inspiration for their text-heavy, dialogue-motored roleplaying game (and their primary competition).
Slay the Spire reached into the trading card game and board game spheres, instead of scanning the horizon for their video game peers. Herein lies the pedestal the video game in question has thus found. MegaCrit did not Try to make a roguelike video game, they had only two options based on their vision of a genre fusion. Either they Did make a groundbreaking deckbuilding game within the established roguelike vocabulary or they Did Not. The fact that I am writing this review right now already provides an answer to that query.
Go ahead and Google Netrunner and Dominion in preparation for reading the rest of this review. You don’t have to be familiar with the minute intricacies of either game, just a glance to make you comfortable in a surface-level understanding of both. These two analog games were the primary driving force behind the design of Slay the Spire, a roguelike ultimately set on removing uncertainty, chance, athletics and motor skills. This to enable the singular use of the video game partaker’s biggest muscle in order to conquer the cloud buster; the brain.
Then it set in motion a whole caravan of imitators, perhaps even building its own microgenre within what is already a niche concept, much like Rogue had done decades prior. There is a reason Slay the Spire is the most played roguelike in my library. Let’s extrapolate those reasons together.
Slay the Spire is made of iron, but glitters like gold
Slay the Spire presents itself without much fanfare for its play; a hook I found myself eagerly latching on to, but that might frustrate others. There is no explicit tutorial, no introductory confections to snack on before you need to go out and hunt your own meals. While the explorer is gated from choosing any other avatar than The Ironclad at the onset of the very first run – Ironclad being the most straightforward of the four avatars – the game itself spends no effort in explaining the machinations behind its mechanics.
Much like Shigeru Miyamoto built his time exploring his back garden into the presentation of the first Legend of Zelda video game, MegaCrit compile few restraints on the player’s two verbs – Do or Don’t – throughout the initial time offered in return for learning Slay the Spire. There is a lot of Don’t here, a staple of the roguelike, but as we climb ever higher, the Do becomes ever more apparent, until we end up having taught ourselves to play entirely.
Whether the reliance on shared genre knowledge is good design I will let lie in the realm of personal opinion. Then – much like riding a bike – the nuances known are now primed to be explored, as the core premise is never again unlearned. It is an amazing feeling of self-accomplishment, I will admit, and why Slay the Spire glitters like gold upon repeat ascension. Yes, the use of that word is very intentional.
Less can always be more in a storied adventure
Each of the four avatars – eventually all available in succession upon booking a successful march to the marquee – have their own narrative attraction towards the mystical spire. It has, however, been so long since I paid any heed that, much like in Miyazaki’s gothic fantasy fields of Dark Souls, the story is tertiary to the point of existing solely in the incidental. You come upon it as a reminder and then, in turn, remind yourself that it exists only to be cobbled together by the willing.
Why are these four souls so drawn to the spire? What lies at its beating heart? Why are they perpetually caught in this never-ending cycle of defeat and victory?
Now, much less like Dark Souls, there is no incentive to grasp the narrative structure in earnest. The exploration and chase for the tower’s beating heart is merely a tool to access more gameplay. There will be no major lore analysis here because it is vague and uninvasive.
This is something I by no means weigh negatively; in fact, I welcome video games with the opportunity in design to relay narrative and story beats in such ways. It shows a propensity for thoughtful prioritization in the creation process, and it serves the game experience well in pushing the concept of deeply involved gameplay to the forefront in order to open the floodgates of delicious brain juice from the video game partaker. The neurons are bouncing left and right in the best way!
An old adage goes: “Believe in the heart of the cards”. Now the more spiritual aspect of this we can disregard (or not; I mean, I have a deck of Tarot that I use regularly, and I have thought about playing a game of Slay the Spire using only the intuition of Tarot), but it does serve to explain that the primary gameplay loop – win battles, puzzles or dungeoneer to acquire cards for your deck – is something the player has to find confidence in.
The core roguelike machination of repetition is baked into the lessons we learn about building a deck of cards we will eventually use to climb to the top of the cone. Even the number of cards needed for a combo to work needs thought; filling your inventory of cardboard rectangles with nothing but gold-rimmed bangers might sound fun, but will in most cases get you nowhere. We need to control ourselves and understand that the grey- and blue-bordered abilities are what will usher us to activate the final golden trap card. That is complemented by the vast array of so-called relics you can hoard through special areas with chests and events (some of them sharing a connection for even rarer relics), in which to further carve out the perfect build.
Each avatar on its own comes with a set of rules and strategies, therefore applying a near-endless amount of math – that the game thankfully does for you – to each run. However, it also spices up each run generated with a boundless amount of combinations. Collect and combine to your heart’s content! After 200+ hours, even without mods to which the community is fond of toying with, I still find it unbelievably fun.
It’s time to put my cards on the table
And “fun” is what I will end this extrapolation with. Slay the Spire is fun. Slay the Spire is neigh-strictly about the brain-juicy mechanical challenge of combinatorics (for people who think looking at numbers is boring). It is brilliant in its replayability, malleable in its difficulty and enticing in its mystery. It is easy to get lost in, easy to rake up the hours with and, most importantly, it allures consistently with the run-on sentence: ‘just another run’.
There is a reason it has yet to overstay its welcome and why it remains relevant in the roguelike atmosphere still today. Especially with roguelikes growing ever more diverse and experimental. Slay the Spire is robust, in both its gameplay choices and relevancy of play.
In returning to Yoda then, after having dragged myself through the spiraling staircase of the spire, even bringing the battle straight to its heart a couple of times, I can set foot on proverbial Dagobah and exclaim that I am still Doing. So in game as in life, in fact. For what are roguelikes if not a bleak imitation of modern life? The cycle of repetition is as inevitable as the everyday setting of the sun, yet – much like in Slay the Spire – we hold the key to making that inevitability worth it over and over again. Art imitates life in this case.
Remember, therefore, to stack your own deck in your favor – to help yourself and others – and study your own rules and strategies instead of assimilating the recipes of another. The beating heart awaits you, champion, and there is no try. There is only Do and Do Not, and you and I both know that the latter option is not the path we want to walk.
Slay the Spire is available to play on Android, iOS, PC (Linux, Mac, SteamDeck, Windows), PlayStation, Switch, and Xbox platforms.
