Slay the Spire

Slay the Spire is a vertiginously challenging and infinitely replayable roguelike deckbuilder set in a highly original dark fantasy universe.

One of the most elegantly designed games in recent memory.

Slay the Spire takes some of the best parts of deckbuilding games, roguelikes, and dungeon crawlers and mixes them into a wholly new and extremely satisfying package. It encourages experimentation, gives you time to make mistakes, and will challenge you immensely as you navigate your way through floor after floor of entertaining, puzzle-like fights. It’s an idea so good that it’s inspired a dozen games like it before it even left early access, but is executed so well that none of them even come close to matching it.

On the surface, Mega Crit's weird blend of rogue-like and card game might seem like a simple dungeon-crawler with some deck-building mechanics thrown in. But, as you dive deeper beneath the surface, and really start to flesh out the complexities tied into each deck, you’ll find an entirely new world of mechanics to learn and master as you try your best to survive each encounter and eventually slay the Spire.

Slay the Spire takes the best parts of roguelites, dungeon crawlers, and card games, and mixes them together into an unholy, but absurdly enjoyable game. It’s the kind of game that gets under your skin and uses it like a tent, just camping out and reminding you that you aren’t playing it. It’s the kind of game that you can jump in for one quick run and suddenly realise that you've been playing for five hours and should really be asleep. It’s the kind of game that is easy to play, hard to master, and impossible to put down. What more could you want?

Overall, I loved Slay the Spire and it definitely deserves the nomination for Fresh Indie Game at the Game Awards, which airs on December 12th. Historically, I’m not a fan of roguelike games, but Slay the Spire made me reconsider my position

Originally released on Steam Early Access in 2017 and followed by a full launch earlier this year, Slay the Spire is a game I knew very little about. That is until I saw the incredibly high scores it received, surpassing the average scores from other fantastic games from 2019 like Resident Evil 2, Devil May Cry 5 and Anno 1800. Where did this game come from? How come I had never heard of it before? What kind of rock was I living under? Fast forward to late May when the game is now available f...

I’m a huge fan of collectable card games, but even I’ll admit the genre begun to feel a bit formulaic. These strategy games typically had their own unique features to separate themselves from one another, but when you drilled down to the core, it’s hard not to see the overwhelming similarities. Slay the Spire is a strategy card game, but it’s completely unlike anything else. Slay the Spire isn’t interested in a competitive multiplayer scene, instead it creates a single player challe...

Slay the Spire is a nearly endlessly replayable Indie delight from Mega Crit. It came out on the PC and PS4 already, but Switch owners owe it to themselves to pick this one up as it's nice to have a such a stellar and casually playable game on the go. Some of the best strategic RPG fights in the industry, with a steep difficulty curve, means you'll be trying to best this game for weeks or months before you tire of it.