Another rogue like deck builder, made by a couple of android net runner players, with some interesting features to set it apart from the others. Collect relics (passive effects that you don't need to cast a card to use) to get stronger to be able to fight harder enemies. See what your enemy is planning to do next turn and cast defensive cards if necessary

It's a really good game. Still on early access, with just 2 classes, but each of the 2 already has different strategies you can try to follow. For example, I have never been able to complete a run with the Silent class by using a poison-based deck (which is the favored approach by many people), but I just completed a run with a "play a lot of cards each turn" deck, and no poison at all. In a shop I found and bought the Panache card which deals 10 damage to all enemies each 5th card I play, and it was perfect for the job.

game is fun

Its an early access game in name but honestly it's solidly playable right now. Like if the developers suddenly all died this would still be worth a good 15+ hours of fun entertainment as is. None of the "this game is bad right now we'll promise tons of features and never complete them" that a lot of early access games fall into.

74 hours here

Warning: jargon ahead only makes sense if you play a lot

Just had a run on ascension 2 as the silent, this badly bloated deck (over 30 cards) which had shivs / after image but no draw, catalyst with only 2 sources of poison, three blurs that were supported by a ragged cast of defences. I took philosopher's stone instead of sozu on the first boss, then took the white beast at second boss so I was actually using potions instead of ignoring them. Got the awakened one as my third boss, survived the dark echo, then died to a low damage attack after my blur ran out when it was half dead.

every time i finish a run where my deck is larger than 15 cards i die a little bit inside

(if theres a lot of powers or stuff that exhausts then a slightly larger deck is acceptable)

also yesterday i had a thin offensive deck with three copies of clash. since i was going to be drawing a lot of 0 and 1 cost cards I figured I needed more card draw and decided to buy an evolve from the store

turns out evolve and clash dont work so well together

still won, the run was rng blessed and the rest of the deck was gas

I don't like paying to remove cards from my decks, so I rarely make consistent decks. I won twice with 30+ card decks yesterday; my silent had infinite blades and a dead branch, so I was also adding more random cards to my deck every turn. I swear some decks should refuse dead branch. But I had lots of good powers to hold the jank together. My other was a strength ironclad that was just undisciplined, taking lots of sword boomerang type cards and then wondering why it took me five turns to draw demon form sometimes. It had jewelled choker so I didn't have any draw to help make it more consistent, but I'd been making a point of fighting elites so I had a huge row of relics that made the deck better.

this game whips. the design space is so huge and unexplored it drives me crazy. they gotta make more than one more class. i've done maybe a dozen runs so far and the game looks ugly but feels smooth

devs have said that they're going to add a third class before the game leaves early access, but after the full release they were definitely interested in adding additional classes beyond the three

also, the new patch for this game just came out

boss portraits and fast mode are both godsends

I guess I need to buy this and stream it for da moneys

Of course this is just personal taste, but in my opinion, graphics are not bad, they have that "hand-made" feeling. I'd take this style over pixel art anytime.

Did anyone else peek inside the .jar file in order to see if there's something already planned for the 3rd class? For those who don't know, .jar files are just like .zip so you can open them with your favorite decompression tool. Mind you, anything about the 3rd class is not set in stone and subject to change, but for now here's what I found:

I think the devs have stated that a lot of the crowbot stuff is just old ideas and won't actually be a part of the third class.

Maybe they're just lying though, who knows.

source

I'm not totally disappointed. I hope they save the gunslinger idea and make a human one rather than a mechanical one, with cowboy hat, guns, and all the classic western stereotypes.

On a different note, I just completed a "Snecko Eye-powered" Ironclad run. The funny thing is I got offered 5 Bludgeon throughout the run, but I got Snecko Eye only after the 4th was offered and until then I didn't want more than 1, so I ended up with 2, plus a Searing Blow +5 which was even better than Bludgeon.

I had a cool deck just then. Runic Pyramid, Demon Form, Reaper, Dual Wield. Get strength up, make copies of reaper, regenerate heaps of life during combat

After 120+ hours, I finally got an infinite combo deck, when I wasn't even going for one initially. I used the combo against all three bosses and against the Maw on the third act. I got an early Fiend Fire and a Dropkick, bought a Finesse from a shop just in case, then got some Burning Pacts and True Grits, thinned my deck down to six cards during the boss fight and recurred Dropkick and Finesse over and over. My deck still grew to 36 cards by the end but with lots of draw and alternate combo pieces / useful tools, like I used Dual Wield on my Fiend Fire to help me thin it down faster, and I had Brutality with Runic Cube so I was drawing seven every turn.

Then I did it again the next game with dual wield and flash of steel, fiend fire and true grit

They finally added the 3rd character in the beta build. There are still many cards with no proper illustration and they get frequent balance changes, but it's nice to be able to play it already.

It's a robot, but totally different from the concept I found in the old files, and it has a unique mechanic: orbs. You can channel an orb, meaning it's added to your active orbs and (usually) has a passive effect, or evoke an orb, meaning it's consumed for an immediate and (usually) more powerful effect than the passive one. If you channel an orb and you have no room for it, the oldest orb is automatically evoked. There are cards that extend your orb capacity, and cards that give you Focus, which strengthens the passive effects. I find this new mechanic really fascinating, because it adds a new layer of strategy: which kind of orbs do I care about the most? Do I keep the orb for its passive effect or do I consume it?

there's a relatively active modding community you could check out if you wanted to wet your appetite, either looking at what other people have done or doing something yourself. Most of the fan-characters i played felt pretty shabby but a lot of them were pretty cool feeling as well.

The game reminds me heavily of a game i was super into a while ago called "deck de dungeon" which was i think originally japanese and had a really bad translation and seemed pretty unpolished in general so i wasn't ever fully aware of what was going on. Both are essentially dungeon crawler/deck builder hybrids. Deck's characters were probably more interesting, and the shared card pool was larger (the difference between characters was generally the starting deck rather than the available card pool). Deck also had a bigger emphasis on degenerate combos and on permanently adding/removing cards from your deck, the end-result being that it felt a lot more like dominion to me. Despite sinking hundreds of hours into deck, I also never beat the default mode.

What I'm looking forward to most from slay the spire, rather than new characters, is probably more content. Ascensions were good for replayability, I'm still not past ascension 6 on my highest character, but i think that what will really feel satisfying is pushing floors. Often I'll get a run that feels like an auto-win, and it is. I one-shot every encounter i get up to and including the final boss. I'd like to see how far I could take those runs if the game was longer, and I'd like for there to be more long-term deck considerations when the game tests a larger variety of things. (right now a deck that can generate enough block or enough damage gets a free pass through all the content.)

Certainly I'd like a fresher variety of characters though. Isaac (which i like to compare this game to) and Deck both had a really wide variety of characters that supported a lot of pretty different playstyles. Right now all three characters have different archetypes, but all the archetypes end up feeling pretty similar, and the differences in playstyle between the characters feels relatively small.

They will probably end up releasing more content, including characters, as paid DLC.

They've not officially stated that they would do so, but that's the thing that just... well logically makes sense. It's much easier to sell new content for an already developed game than it is to make a second major hit.



They have stated that they plan for the 3rd mode to be an Endless Mode. I'm not sure how much difficulty scaling that will entail if any but i would expect it to be more punishing than just beating the game.

They have also stated that they plan for the Heart to just be a placeholder for an actual ending. I'm not sure what they are going to do but they are going to try to let you "Beat the Game" in some fashion at some point here.

I'm hoping the achievements they add when the Defect enters the game aren't too hard. I've gotten all the ones currently in the game, and I feel somewhat compelled to do whatever stupid thing ("Ooh Donut!" being the best example of a really stupid achievement) each one asks of me to keep the list at 100%. If they ask us to beat Ascension 15 on all 3 characters I'm going to cry a little, so I'm hoping it's mostly just Defect related stuff (do certain builds, win a game with the Defect, etc.).

Currently I'm at Ascension 11 with Ironclad and Ascension 5 with Silent. That's just because I took a break to... have a life. I have spent 222 hours playing this game, which is too much if you aren't a streamer considering the short time span that all occurred in.

The text in the book event on act 2 seems to suggest that beating the game with one of the books would result in a different ending than otherwise

my ascension numbers are 6/3/2 and my hours played is 150