Slay the Spire Review

The insight that founded a genre is that a deckbuilder's real cost is dilution. Adding a card makes your deck worse at doing the thing it already did, so the interesting decision after every fight is usually to take nothing, and no card game before this had made refusal a strategy. Around that sits a climb of branching paths where you choose your own risk, elite fights that pay in relics, and four characters whose entire mechanical identity is different rather than differently coloured.

Enemy intents are shown a turn ahead, which turns each combat from a gamble into a solvable puzzle and is the reason losses feel earned. Ascension levels give it a ladder that runs for hundreds of hours. The presentation is functional at best, with art that reads as placeholder next to what came after it, and there is nothing resembling a story. Some relics and card combinations are so far above the rest that a run's ceiling is often decided in the first act by what the game happened to offer.