What makes her so different from the other classes is her ability to move in and out of powerful stances using cards. I loved that many of them have drawbacks to go along with their perk, like Relics that increase the mana you have to play cards at the cost of not being able to heal or gain gold, adding to your pile of difficult decisions.The Watcher is Slay the Spire's fourth character, a blind ascetic - a kind of monk - who has come to evaluate the Spire. The more you have, the crazier things get.
Some are as simple as a permanent attack boost, while others will do things like randomize the cost of every single card you draw. They can be found in chests and from beating bosses or special elite enemies, and they offer permanent (and often significant) advantages. Outside of cards, you can also find consumable Potions that give you temporary boosts, but the really exciting pickups are the Relics. The exciting challenge comes from how you adapt to the randomized cards and Relics you find along the way. And while it can seriously suck to build toward a specific plan and simply never see the key card you need to make it really work, a perk of these short runs is that it’s not too hard to brush off an unlucky loss and try again. But you aren’t always so lucky, and the interesting and ever-changing challenge of Slay the Spire is how you adapt your strategy based on what cards are actually offered to you along the way. It feels fantastic when you decide to lean into a certain style and manage to find all of the combo pieces you were hoping for, tearing through enemies with synergies that were specifically designed for each other.
For example, the Silent can pick up attacks that stack a poison effect on enemies which you can then multiply or burst with rarer cards, but its card pool also supports a deck built around generating tons of free Shiv attack cards and then buffing them with other effects. While the available characters roughly conform to some general RPG archetype – the Ironclad is the warrior, the Silent is the rogue, and the Defect is kind of like a mage with a bio-mechanical twist – they each have multiple viable play styles you can try to build your deck around. But the simple animations for playing cards are still satisfyingly snappy, and I could take some turns lightning-fast once I got more comfortable. Taking as much pressure-free time as I needed was helpful early on, and pulling up the deck or discard screens even conveniently pauses the action during your opponent’s turn. Slay the Spire doesn’t rush you with a timer as you make those tough calls either, so my confidence actually grew from every failed run since. Those little decisions are deceptively important, and there’s rarely an objectively “right” choice, which leaves lots of room to find your personal play style. Knowing when you can afford to take a few points of damage to inflict a few more of your own isn’t a huge deal in the heat of a battle, but it can make the difference in the long run as the Spire wears you down. It can be as simple as when you choose to play an attack card or a defense card.
Slay the Spire has an addictive loop of experimenting, dying, and growing for the next run. As you work your way up the Spire, you’ll fight increasingly difficult monsters to acquire a randomized selection of new cards that slowly build your deck into something better. Don’t mistake it for a deckbuilding game like Hearthstone or Magic: The Gathering instead, you pick one of three varied but equally exciting characters with unique card pools and start with a super basic deck. Here’s a genre mix you probably haven’t seen before: Slay the Spire is a deckbuilding roguelike dungeon crawler.