Slay the Spire

A lot of randomness with a restrictive window for viable builds to reliably get you through a run. There is a lot of variety in terms of cards, enemies, etc., but you are punished for experimenting and lack meaningful control over too many factors that are vital for you to succeed. The game offers many hours of gameplay, ultimately falls short for me and fails to satisfy its potential.

Could GOG please add support for MODs & DLCs, especially the Downfall DLC, like on Steam? Also, Steam version is 2.3.4, while here, we only get an outdated version 2.2.0. (The changes are not only about the Steam Deck, but there are additional bugfixes, too.)

For a deckbuilding game, it's certainly fun, and there's a decent learning curve to start off with. But one of my irks is the time wasted because of the random number generator. It'll take half an hour to realise that the cards you've been offered don't amount to a hill of beans. So restart. And with a good build, you're still completely at the mercy of the random number generator (I can't count the amount of times that I've had almost exclusively defensive cards when I needed to play offensively, followed by no defensive at all when most needed). There are cards that let you retrieve others, but you need to be offered them in the first place. If they never appear, then you're out of luck. I've put in over 30 hours, which is testament to it being fun. Certainly interesting enough a challenge to want to beat, but at the end of it, its lifetime with me was limited due to the frustration factor.

The game has a great concept. It is a deeply complex card game / rogue-lite gauntlet of challenges. It is simple at a first look but it has a lot of depth to be discovered. Where the game ultimately falls apart is in its procedural generation of challenges. The difference in forgiveness for sub-optimal strategies between runs is jarring, and there may be quite a few runs that are generated in a manner that they might be doomed from the start.

There are a lot of RNG-based games around at the moment. Slay the Spire in my opinion does a lot of things the right way, it is a lot of fun to play and has great mechanics to build up combos. But it is too damn hard! I played it for over 50 hours and I did not get to the final ending of it. Of course, maybe I have always been unlucky with my cards / relicts or I always choose wrong strategies - who knows. All I know, I had a lot of fun playing this and every time my character had been killed off I hated this game for being too hard. And this I the only part I have to criticise. They should have added some feature like Into the Breach, where your character slowly gets stronger after every death until you are finally strong / lucky enough to beat the game. Instead you only unlock more cards / relics which are not necessarily better than the ones you already can have.