Slay the Spire is the greatest video game of all time
“Quality over quantity” seems to be a concept lost on game developers and game reviewers alike. Games like Skyrim — with it’s 1,000 NPC’s, a million spells and weapons, a billion items to find everywhere and a trillion game breaking bugs— are instantly heralded as instant classics based on the amount of stuff there is to do in the game alone. It seems that all a game needs to have is a long run time to receive near perfect scores and universal appraise despite it’s many flaws.
Slay the Spire, a 2019 rouge like deck building game by MegaCrit, does not have a particularly long play time. A single run will rarely top the sixty minute mark, and disastrous runs could be over in less than five (Ascension 20 is very hard :( ). With only four different characters, 400 or so cards, and the same three levels over and over with repeating enemies, it seems that Slay the Spire just can’t compare to the other games found a top the Metacritic ratings list. Somehow, a game that is essentially just repeating the same levels over and over again is outright better than all the rest.
This is because Slay the Spire truly shines in its game play. On the surface it looks extremely simple. You have enough energy to play a couple cards, some attack, some defend, some inflict status conditions. It it is the many ways that these cards interact, along with the many potions and relics, that make the game one of the most rewarding experiences ever. The game consistently provides the players with relatively easy combo’s to maximize damage, making the player feel extremely smart with limited actual work of their end.
For example, one of the available relics for the character The Silent is “Snecko Skull”. The relic adds an additional point of poison — a decaying damage over time that applies every turn — every time poison is applied. This can smartly be combo’d with the card “Noxious Fumes” which applies 2 (3 when upgraded) points of poison to each enemy at the start of each turn, as it gives an addition point of poison to every enemy on every turn. Combine this with the card “Envenom”, which applies poison every time the player lands and unblocked attack, and another relic like “The Specimen”, which passes on poison from one enemy to another whenever the enemy dies, and suddenly a player can easily rack up the…
