This looks really neat, and it’s only a buck. Thanks for sharing!
Is this Adventure mode?
Yes, it’s adventure mode, but not all of it. Older adventures work like this: you buy access to several bosses for in-game (or real life) currency and beating them with your own decks gives you rewards. Then starting with Frozen Throne adventures are free and the reward is mostly vanity like card backs or hero skins. Then Dream Quest guy made Dungeon Run for Kobolds & Dungeons, then similar thing for later expansions.
Those are the good stuff. Apart from some launch quests there’s no gameplay reward for playing those runs. And you can’t use anything from the rest of the game there, those modes have their own decks and heroes. It’s great.
So… I don’t know if I’ve fallen out of love with a game faster than this. It feels like there’s a very low skill ceiling, and you’re fully at the mercy of the RNG gods. This hasn’t bothered me in other rogue-lites, but I think those had higher skill ceilings so I could tell myself there’s room for me to improve. Here I feel like I know most of the combos already but getting them is so hard and rare, and even if I get some really good ones it might not be enough for the bosses because of random draw order and boss attacks. Am I wrong?
I’ve watched people win every round straight up to Ascension 15. I don’t think it is that bad. All card games are random. Part of the skill is knowing how to work with what you get, even when its shit
Yeah @Bluddy you’re wrong ;)
The strategy in StS is rarely in how to play a hand once you draw it. It’s all in the deck-building, and there’s way more there than I think you’re giving it credit for if you’re focused on the “good” combos (that you know of).
It’s like a Magic draft. Do you luck into some nonsense that lets you steamroll sometimes? Sure. But good players win more often than they lose because they know how to navigate a draft as it’s ongoing and how to build around a mana curve and the themes in the environment and the current meta &c &c.
That said, if you’re bored you’re bored! It’s a video game, not rocket surgery. I dropped Dead Cells with a whole lot of skill cap headroom because I don’t want to invest the time in mitigating my old man reflexes with better pattern recognition and muscle memory, and I feel no shame at all.
I’ve found myself never quite reaching the same level of enthrallment with this game that a lot of people have, despite seeming like it should be right up my alley.
And I think this the main reason:
The process of playing out each hand just doesn’t seem to serve up enough interesting, strategic decisions to justify occupying such a large percentage of playtime. The decisions you make on how to grow and modify your deck over time tend are much more likely to be interesting. But for a lot of battles the “right” way to play a given turn is fairly obvious, and the possibility space is constrained. There’s certainly tension in seeing whether your deck serves up what you need and the combos come together (and there are some turns that do serve up tricky dilemmas), but it still winds up feeling like quite a bit of clicking through the motions of a solved problem.
Deckbuilding roguelikes might just not be the sub-sub-genre for me. I remember having similar complaints about Dream Quest and Monster Slayers (as well as traditional multiplayer deckbuilders for that matter). I love both roguelikes and card games, but they haven’t quite grabbed me in the same way that other tactical/strategic variations on the genre have (Into the Breach, Battle Brothers, Renowned Explorers, Darkest Dungeon, etc.)
I don’t think the rate of interesting decisions is much different than DCSS. 90% of the decisions in both games are auto-pilot with a large chunk of the moment-to-moment skill being recognizing when you’re in the other 10% of the moments and how to effectively deal with them.
The primary benefit of this method of play is it substantially increases the number of actions you can fit into a short play-time, allowing the game to focus on evaluating and building an engine. I think this is the focus of both DCSS and Slay the Spire, both of which have a more high-level strategic focus that is well suited to this style of play. In comparison to Brogue or Into the Breach which much more heavily focuses on those moment-to-moment tactical decisions, and as a consequence have a lot less decisions per session because of the expectation that you’re focusing on each one more.
I really like both approaches, but they feel pretty different. I probably have a different preference on most days.
That…that is a great comparison.
I should log onto akrasiac and see what those crazy kids have patched in over the last (checks watch) uh, couple years.
What’s DCSS?
Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup. One of the major traditional roguelikes.
I just read this and 100% this is me as well.
Slay the Spire has given me hundreds of hours of fun, it just clicks with me super tight.
Oh, okay yeah, I totally know what that game is, just didn’t fit it with an the acronym.
It’s been a few years since I played DCSS as well, but I don’t know if I agree with your characterization of it. One of the reasons I wound up loving it more than Nethack or Angband was that they put a lot of effort into making those “autopilot decisions” actually run on autopilot. Their design philosophy emphasizes limiting rote tasks so the player can focus on the more interesting decisions. Automatic exploration and traversal, no need to gather trash loot to sell, emphasis of randomly generated artifacts to be individually weighed against each other on each run rather than Nethack’s fixed checklist “ascension kit”, etc.
It’s not perfect of course, but it does a good job of letting the player skim along from one reasonably interesting tactical scenario to the next.
I like it better than Angband and Nethack for the same reason. It has a combat focus and gets you to that combat really quickly. Still, some pretty large percent of those combats I play as auto pilot as I do a deck in Slay the Spire. If I’m playing a mage, I have my standard approach to handling corridors, line of sight and mana management that I use in every combat until I’m against something it won’t work against. It’s not brainless (and I don’t think running StS decks is either), but I am busting through my actions and those fights rarely slowing down to consider options. I think how often I play a deck weird against a particular enemy or consider using a potion is probably not that dissimilar to how often I use consumables in DCSS.
In comparison, in Brogue there are very few encounters I can ever run on auto pilot, except maybe for the first few floors. The floor layouts and item selection throws the game for such a crazy loop each time I play that I’m constantly playing slow and considering everything. If DCSS took as much effort for every combat as Brogue it would take me 100 hours to complete a game.
OK I watched a streamer with more ascensions than I have. Seems like the key thing I was missing was a few extra combos. With those, it appears you can win more often than not.
Higher ascension levels are difficult and can feel a bit like a crap shot to beat.
They rely much more on approach and experience though. Combos aren’t super game defining and I think your earlier described impression of being at the mercy of randomness is mostly based on a lack of experience and adaptability. Super combos can carry you yes, but in the majority of games you just need to pick good cards, some synergy and generally have a well mixed deck with one or two win conditions.
While it’s true that even the best players have a notable number of losses at the highest ascensions they still have very high win rates.
As an example I would provide Joinrbs. 90%+ winrate on ascension 20 and 70%+ winrate for the heart boss at ascension 20 is super hard, but achievable with his insane amount of playtime.
He streams a lot of Slay on Twitch, his youtube is more focused on heavily explained runs.
You don’t have to watch hours to get what I mean though. Just tuning in into a random run on twitch or watching a few minutes of one of the explainy youtube videos will show you the difference in experience and approach. It’s not just how each player rates cards. There is so much planning and consideration most players don’t do because it simply wasn’t necessary until ascension 16. Only very few hard rules and much more soft adaptation to the needs and challenges of a specific run that didn’t play a big role before.
It’s also worth looking back. People are chafed by randomness at Ascension 0. Which at this point you probably can beat in your sleep because you got much better at playing with and around the randomness.
For each player there comes a point (at different stages for different people) where the effort to get better is more than that person is willing to invest into a game. That Slay successfully provides such a wide range of playing field for casual and super invested players at the same time is a strength in my opinion.
Most importantly, even the less involved player will probably beat a challenge that feels impossible to him in the beginning. Few games are able to do that without inflating numbers and stuff like that.
Thanks for the feedback guys. I’ll watch those vids and try to improve my technique.
Thats a lot of copies!
So great to see a wonderful game rewarded like this by the market. If only all wonderful games received such rewards :(