LogFAQs > #933162306

#14





Years of release: 2017-2019 (PC early access), 2019 (PC/PS4/XB1/Switch)
Beaten?: A20 act 4 on Silent/Defect but still working on Ironclad/Watcher

Clocking in at an unconscionable 1,144 hours, Slay the Spire easily ranks as my most-played game of the decade, and surely ranking near the top of my most-played games ever, although I believe Rock Band 2 is still the likely titleholder (although I'll never really know how much time I spent playing it and I don't really want to know). You might have thought a certain other game might have been the highest, but that other game is only in the 700 hour range! This is my most-played Steam game right now and it will take quite the effort for any game to top it.

Slay the Spire is a roguelike deckbuilder. If you've ever played Dominion or something of the sort, the concept will be familiar here. It's like a CCG, except you always start with the same, basic deck, and through the course of play, drawing cards, playing them, discarding and reshuffling, you use the cards in your deck to defeat monsters and advance through the Spire's many floors, adding cards to your deck as you go (and sometimes removing cards) and powering yourself up to take on the challenging boss fights at the end. Like any roguelike, the game's different every time you play, and if you die, you start a new run from the beginning.

Does this game really have 1,144 hours of content? Well, probably not quite that much. But I've had a lot of times in my life between late 2017 and now when the exact thing I needed was a Slay the Spire run. It's comfort food - something I can pick up for an hour or two to relax and put down whenever suits me. I never really get bored of this game. The possible strategy space is pretty vast, almost every card in the game is useful and be utilized as part of some effective and fun strategy, so every game feels a little different. Adding cards to my deck and collecting relics and watching myself get stronger over the course of the run just has an addictive quality to it, and there's enough variety here that no two runs ever feel quite the same.

The game's pretty challenging too. My first ever run, on Ironclad, was a victory, and my first Silent run was a death to the act 3 boss; but after that stroke of luck I found myself needing improve my skills and knowledge to keep that streak up. I did, but the game offers one of the most clever difficulty mode options I've seen; Ascension mode, which goes from levels 1 to 20 and adds incrementally harder challenges to each run, beefing up enemy hp and damage, giving you less gold and healing, adding junk to your deck and making events worse, just turning up the heat a little more each run until you hit ascension 20 and suddenly the game has gone from relatively simple to completely oppressive. Ascension 20 and act 4 didn't exist for about the first half of my career playing this game, but even still, I have only scored an act 4 victory on A20 three times ever. This level of challenge gives me a lot of motivation and a lot of room to really focus on playing my best, and that combined with the variety of different cards at my disposal keeps me coming back, trying to increase my mastery of the game little by little.

My only complaint about the game really is that it's pretty random what cards and relics you get, and some relics and cards are much better than others. I really like roguelikes that present you with different but equal options, focusing on having runs have variety, rather than a variable chance of success - sometimes hoping for great relics in Spire can be a bit of a frustration when you get dumped with the really bad ones. But it's a pretty minor complaint, as most of the possibilities in this game are viable.

Not much more to say than that. Dominion has long been one of my favorite board games, and the mechanics of adding and removing cards from your deck during play in order to create the most efficient deck has long been a game mechanic that has fascinated me. I haven't been able to play as much Dominion lately, but the single-player Slay the Spire has given me the opportunity to really think about those mechanics in a different setting. After all this time, I still haven't really mastered the new DLC character, so I've still got more of this game to play. A roguelike deckbuilder is right up my alley as far as games that can absorb all of my time go; I don't know what type of game it will take to break my current playtime in Spire but it'll have to be pretty damn good.