To better understand the context for everything else I'm going to say in this review, let's start with an overview of how the game works and what you actually do in it. If you're already familiar with the basic gameplay concepts, then you can skip ahead to just get more of my thoughts on the game as a whole.
Combat is where the bulk of the gameplay happens, and it involves drawing a fresh hand of cards to play each turn with a limited amount of energy that you can spend playing cards of different costs. You play as many cards as you can (or want to), then discard the remainder and draw up a fresh hand of cards to choose from on your next turn. When your draw pile runs out, you shuffle the discard to form a new draw pile, and continue until either you or the enemies run out of health. Most cards will give you a certain amount of Attack (used for damaging enemies) or Block (used for defending enemy attacks), but others will do more situational things like debuffing enemies, buffing yourself, manipulating your deck, or doing other more exotic things depending on which character you're playing.
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The four characters each have their own completely separate cards that lend them a unique playstyle: the Ironclad is a warrior archetype with multiple ways to buff his strength, often in exchange for sacrificing health, while getting free heals at the end of every combat; the Silent is an assassin archetype with less total health, but an emphasis on manipulating her deck to draw more cards for better selection while using poison to damage enemies over time, and shivs that do small amounts of damage but are free to play; the Defect is sort of like a mage, with the ability to summon orbs of different elements (lightning deals direct damage, frost adds to your defenses, plasma gives you energy, etc) that will deal constant passive effects while they're out, but then amplify for a stronger effect when consumed; and the Watcher is a monk who shifts in and out of different offensive and defensive stances, with different benefits to gain while in a stance and when changing stances. Each character therefore plays completely differently, with their own unique strategies to employ based on how you choose to combo cards and what aspect of their potential build you want to focus on.
Winning a combat allows you to choose one of three random cards to add your deck, and also gives you gold that you can spend in shops to buy cards or other power-ups like potions and relics -- potions having a one-time special effect like giving you a free card to play for that turn or doing a small amount of counter damage for the duration of that combat, and relics being a permanent buff that lasts for the entire run, like giving you extra Block every time you play so many attacks, or automatically upgrading certain types of cards when they're added to your deck. In-between combats, you choose the path you want to take on each floor of the tower, following connected points to either fight common enemies or elite enemies, which will be tougher mini-bosses that give you relics if you survive. You can also stop at a Campfire to either heal yourself or upgrade one card of your choosing, which will give it better stats, or you could have a random encounter, which could be virtually anything -- another enemy battle, a mini-game where you match cards from memory, a roulette wheel where you get whatever random reward or penalty it lands on, or a little "choose your own adventure" type scenario where you make a choice about how to proceed with whatever the narrative situation may be.
The
game is broken into three Acts, with a boss waiting for you at the end
of each Act; if you defeat a boss, you get a special Boss Relic which is
even more powerful than standard relics, plus a rare powerful card of your choosing, and get healed to full health
so that you can continue onto the next Act where all the enemies and encounters will be harder. Beat the boss of Act 3, and you win with that character... sort
of. You get a preliminary victory, anyway, but the REAL victory involves
beating the game with all three starting characters which unlocks the
Watcher character, as well as the ability to trigger the bonus Act 4
scenario if you accomplish certain
goals along the way in any normal run. Beating Act 4 is more of the True
Ending, but the game also has 20 progressive difficulty levels beyond
that, called "ascensions" that add cumulative buffs to enemies and
debuffs to your abilities if you'd like to continue playing for extra
challenge, plus daily challenges that include all kinds of really bizarre twists and a custom mode for making your own scenarios, for literally infinite replayability.
As far as my actual review is concerned, you probably don't need me to tell you this given that the game has been out for about six years now and has garnered such an overwhelmingly positive reputation, but it really is a lot of fun and can be super addicting once you start getting the hang of things.
It's not necessarily an easy game to get into, however, seeing as it doesn't have much of a dedicated tutorial to explain things apart from how to literally play the game, which mostly pertains to things like the basic rules and controlling the interface. Otherwise, your first time playing is effectively just you being thrown right into a full game with no understanding of how specific cards work or what different effects really entail, with a fairly steep learning process to figure out most of the game's mechanics through reading tool-tip descriptions of things as you go, and then experimenting through trial-and-error to see how things actually work in practice. And because there are SO many different cards and SO many different enemies and SO many different random events and SO many different status effects and SO many different relics and potions that you can run into, with a different randomized selection of these for every single run where you might be encountering tons of brand-new things that you have to learn for your first dozen or so runs, it leads to a fair amount of confusion in the early goings and just a lot of feeling overwhelmed by the sheer number of things you need to learn to really start figuring things out.
From there it's an extremely deep pool of different complex strategies that are heavily obscured by just how random everything seems to be, thereby making it difficult (at first) to get a good grasp on how to play the game well, since literally every run will be completely different. A strategy that worked well in one run might completely flop the next because you couldn't replicate the exact same deck of cards, or you had different relics giving you different boosts, or you ran into different enemies that just happened to be a strong counter for that particular build but weren't present in your previous run, and so on. You therefore can't take lessons learned from one run and apply them directly towards improving the very next run in a sort of linear process of getting steadily better each time you play; instead, you just kind of have to file that information away in the back of your brain and wait until you have a large enough sample size of total experience to start noticing patterns emerge from all these random combinations, and then keep those patterns in mind in all future plays so that you can experiment through trial-and-error to start deciphering meaningful knowledge from that information. In that way, it takes some legitimate commitment to really start feeling like you actually understand the game properly.
If that sounds intimidating, I don't mean it to be -- it's not like the game is some kind of indecipherable puzzle that's nigh impossible to crack or anything -- you do get better the more you play, but it just takes time at the start because there's constantly new information to process, with the range of possibilities being infinitely wide in this game. There is in fact lots of strategy to learn that will help you do better, and the more exposure you give yourself to the game, the more you improve, with things like getting to know the specific types of enemies so that you can anticipate what they're going to do before they do it to have some sort of counter ready, and getting a knack for selecting cards that will help to mitigate difficult situations down the road but while also synergizing well with the cards you already have, and knowing what cards combo well with each other and when certain relics or cards will be more useful depending on where you are in a run and how your deck has been constructed to that point, and learning the hard lesson that sometimes you SHOULDN'T take rewards when offered to you because they might actually make your deck WORSE, and likewise that a card that seemed great in a previous run might not be great in your current one due to the other variables in play, and then figuring out what situations are best to play what types of cards in terms of trading offense for defense and vice versa while optimizing your ability to survive combat encounters with the least amount of damage sustained, and so on.
The game is genuinely difficult at first, not necessarily due to being deliberately balanced that way in terms of enemy stats being set arbitrarily high to force you into inevitably losing more often than you win, or anything like that, but more so because of how much knowledge is required to work around different situations and play things to your advantage. And that's really what makes it such a compelling and engaging experience, if you can get into that aspect of trying to solve the puzzle, so to speak. You don't get better in this game by leveling up your character and receiving permanent bonuses that will apply from run to run -- instead, YOU get better by learning and developing a sense of skill and mastery over it, and it becomes really satisfying once things start to click and you realize that you are, in fact, actually winning more now that you have a better idea of what you're actually doing, and WHY your decisions are working out to your advantage. Even though there is still a high degree of randomization and luck involved with every run, you can mitigate most of it if you know what you're doing, leading to really experienced players having a 90% success rate on the standard difficulty, or some other absurdly high number. That makes for an extremely rewarding progression curve that keeps you coming back for more, since it's always a brand new experience each game you play but with permanent lessons that can be applied towards improving your overall mastery of the game. And with so many new cards, potions, relics, characters, and difficulty levels to unlock, there's a TON of new stuff to keep coming back to, and always more ways to challenge yourself so you can continue pushing yourself to get better.
Despite all of this extensive depth and complexity, the game actually has a surprising degree of straightforward simplicity to it, which makes this process of deciphering all of its nuances much more accessible than some other types of card games. The cards themselves, for example, aren't riddled with dozens of icons and lines upon lines of descriptive text buried under cluttered graphic design and artwork that takes up the majority of the card -- instead, they use really clean and simple graphics with a pleasant contrast to easily signify all the relevant information; artwork that easily identifies each card at a passing glance by way of very distinct, prominent imagery; and effect text that is always really short and to the point in what they do, with everything explained in clear cut terminology. The game's complexity therefore stems not from literal complexities in how the cards function, but in how they all interact with each other as well as all the different relics you can acquire to create so many diverse combos and unique situations. For instance, something that sounds great on paper might actually backfire horribly on you because you didn't think to consider another variable in your setup, which you might not realize until it's too late, or cards that might sound iffy or unappealing may actually turn out to be total game-changers when paired with certain other cards or relics. There's all kinds of crazy combos you can pull off, too, from super tanky builds that turn defense into offense or decks that can draw an infinite amount of zero cost cards with the right setup or stacking poison in all kinds of ludicrous ways. The individual mechanics for how each specific thing works are usually pretty easy to comprehend on their own, but it's in these combinations where the learning curve kicks in, where the more familiar you become with interactions and possibilities, the better you can work to take advantage of those situations when they begin presenting themselves within a run.
Enemy intentions are likewise telegraphed in a clear manner so you always know exactly what type of behavior they're planning on their turn and exactly how much damage you need to block to survive each attack, while the abundant tooltips for every single thing help to explain specific mechanics instantly without having to search for a rulebook, so it's really easy to read and process all the relevant information. You may not know, however, exactly what a specific buff or debuff that an enemy is performing will do until you've played enough times to know what each specific enemy is capable of and therefore what they're actually doing when you see those symbols appear over their heads. Hence the learning curve, once again, where enemies act consistently from run to run so the more you familiarize yourself with them, the better you can predict their intentions. Many enemies are also designed specifically to counter certain types of builds, like with some having high counter attack damage which punishes decks that don't have a lot of block to absorb the reflected damage or other ways to deal damage indirectly, while others might punish you if you play too much of a defensive, turtling game by making them get stronger the longer the fight goes on, thus rewarding you if you're able to kill them faster before their power can build. Sometimes an enemy will have a constantly reapplying defensive buff that will negate the first few points of damage you deal, which punishes decks that are based on dealing a lot of smaller, weaker attacks, and other times they might fill your deck up with clutter to dilute your ability to get to your good cards, which could be really bad if you don't have a good way to cycle through all those duds. This variety ensures that there's always some degree of tension and dynamic reactions to every run, because it's hard to build a deck that will work perfectly for every enemy type, and so you'll almost always be required to shift and adapt your strategies in each run, whether during individual combat encounters or else in the overall strategy of how you build your deck to account for specific types of encounters.
The randomization of every run contributes to the raw excitement of wanting to keep trying again and again, because you never know what weird combinations you'll run into. A lot of the game's fun factor stems solely from experimenting with all the different variables and just seeing what will happen, and then trying to recreate similar winning conditions where you keep hoping "maybe I'll get this combo I saw before that worked really well," all-the-while hoping for those opportunities in each run. It's the same sort of variable reward schedule that makes slot machines so addicting, because there's always a chance you might pull off some really cool combo, but you can never predict when it will happen. With every run being completely unique, and with such a wide array of possibilities, it also keeps the game feeling fresh for long stretches of time since you aren't getting the same combos all the time, which would then becoming boring because it's too predictable. I myself have played for over 118 hours across over 150 runs, with a mere 18% win rate while having "only" unlocked Ascension 10 on my two favorite characters, and yet I keep coming back to it because even the losses are fun when I'm able to experience some new combination each time, and I want that satisfaction of beating those higher difficulties and continuing to improve my overall game.
It helps, too, that I play the mobile version on my Android phone, which allows me to play anytime, anywhere. And it costs only $10 on mobile versus $25 on PC or console, which is another added bonus. As a mobile game, this works as a pretty wholesome time-filler, since games can be played in short bursts with a convenient "Quit and Save" function that lets you jump right back in to the start of whatever encounter you left off at. You can play just a few individual encounters which might only last a few minutes and put the game away, or if you want to kill a longer amount of time, say 20 minutes or so, then you can play an entire Act until you beat the boss. I do find that it is a little bit difficult to jump back into a run midway through, however, unless I'm getting right back to it pretty quickly, because if I wait too long I might forget what cards and relics I had in that run and what I was planning to do, and then I have to spend time re-familiarizing myself with everything which slows down the pace of play when I pick it up again. Besides that, the game just works better when you're able to play it in one complete session, since so much of it is based on a sense of momentum as your deck gets bigger and more powerful with cascading effects; if you're constantly stopping and starting a run, that growth curve gets to feel disjointed, and you don't quite get the full scope of that snowball effect in play.
The main downside I find to the mobile version is that the interface is a little annoying, with no direct ability to de-select a card from your hand which makes it really easy to accidentally play it if you click on an enemy or your character just hoping to read the tool-tips, thus requiring you to click on something harmless like the energy symbol every time before clicking on something else. The whole game also revolves around swiping up from the bottom center of the screen to play cards which inevitably causes me to trigger Android's gesture navigations, since that action often brings up the home bar and notifications. Since you can't hover your cursor over something, the only way to bring up certain tooltips is to click-and-hold on something, which can sometimes be disastrous if it's a selection screen and you end up moving your hand in some way that causes the game to think you just straight up clicked on something and you get stuck with whatever it was. Some of the other functions are difficult to access, too, like when trying to click tiny icons around the edge of the screen to view the map or my discard pile, but I can't say for sure if this is an issue with the app's implementation, or if has more to do with my phone making the icons smaller than my finger tip, or something else.
So overall, I think this would be a better game to play on PC or console where the controls would be better, and where you probably are more committed to sit down for a full session at a time, but I still really like being able to play it on-the-go, because I can play for 15 minutes or an hour wherever I might be, just to pass the time, but still feel like I'm gaining something out of it on account of that deep learning process and all the progressive end-game goals that I can work towards.
I should mention there's also a board game version, which is actually a really solid adaptation and can be a lot of fun to play since it adds cooperative multiplayer elements, but it is very expensive and nowhere near as fast or smooth to play as the video game which handles all the bookkeeping for you automatically. It's not quite the same game, since the decks and mechanics are heavily streamlined, and I'm pretty sure there's nowhere near as much total variety as what comes in the video game, but it captures the spirit of the video game really well, and I've had fun playing it. In fact, I would probably rate it among the top half of deck-building board games that I've played. I haven't played it much, however -- only three total acts across two sessions on someone else's copy -- so I can't comment on it much more than that apart from to say that if you're into hobby board gaming and like the ideas of what the video game has to offer, then the board game version might be worth your consideration as well.
My biggest caveat to Slay the Spire may be that I don't think it's the type of game you can play just casually and get the same sort of fulfillment out of it. If you only play it for 10 or so hours, as you would some other types of campaign-based games with a definite ending, say by only playing until you beat it with each character, and maybe also beating Act 4, then you may only scratch the surface of what the game has to offer, and may walk away feeling mildly underwhelmed by it. That can be true of a lot of roguelike games just in general, but this is a game that really rewards repeated plays, and I think you'll only get that level of personal satisfaction where your growth as a player is the greatest reward if you stick with it over a long enough period of time to actually develop your skill level. It's not really a "play it through once, and then move on" type of game, in other words -- I mean, I suppose you could play it like that, but it's really more of a "lifestyle game" where this becomes an ongoing thing that you play for months or years at a time, maybe not as your main gaming focus but just as something you keep coming back to because there's always more to learn and always deeper to dig. Or at least, that's how it's been in my experience; I actually started playing in August 2024 and have been continually playing it ever since -- not every day, of course, and with a couple months of break time here and there, but it's not uncommon to see people recommending it with hundreds of hours invested, because it's just that type of game that draws people in and makes you want to stick with it. In a way, I actually kind of hate this game because of how addicting it can be, where I might plan to just sit down for a single 20-minute Act and then suddenly find I've been playing for 75 minutes, only to die at the very end and immediately launch a new run to try "just one more game." So if you value your time, this might be one worth avoiding because there's a chance you might find yourself fully committed to it. But even if you do, it's a really good game that has a lot to offer for a relatively low, all-in-one price. Beyond that, it's just plain simple fun to build your deck and see how far you can get each time, and the gameplay is really smooth and snappy, so it's an easy recommendation if you think this is something you might enjoy.
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