The goal of the game is to keep me playing. It keeps me playing by staying at the edge of my skill.
All I did today was play Slay the Spire 2. Not most of what I did. All.[1]
A game that can eat an entire Friday of a grown man’s finite life deserves an autopsy. Three findings.
First: I can watch myself getting better. The game has five characters, each demanding a different approach, and I randomize between them every run — I don’t know who I’ll be until the wheel stops. No settling into a groove. Every run I find a weakness in my play; next run I improve it and find another. A satisfying learning curve.
Second: the difficulty rises to meet me. When I win a run, the next one starts with a handicap, along the lines of “start with 70% of my health”. Win again and the handicaps stack: tack on “only two potion slots instead of three”. The game keeps re-placing itself exactly at the edge of my skill, run over run over run.
One amusing wrinkle: the maps are procedurally generated, and someone once went looking and proved that at least one run of the original Slay the Spire is literally unwinnable. Which is fine — that’s the cost of procedural generation. But it’s funny, because I would never know. I’d just be disappointed that I failed.
Third: it’s meditative. The verbs are few and constant: select card, play card. Select room. Occasionally buy item or use potion. That’s the whole vocabulary. Die in room 40, start the next run immediately. It pairs well with music, which is to say it occupies exactly as much of me as I give it.
I’ve written before that when I’m playing a game I love, three things happen: I pay attention without effort; I want to improve; and when it ends, I want more. Slay the Spire 2 is those three sentences built as software. The attention is the meditation. The improvement is visible. And “when it ends, I want more” — well. See: my Friday.
Any further questions?
“How is it better than the first one?” Slower, more intentional drip of unlocks. More characters. Better balance. More distinct strategy paths within each character, depending on the cards you’re dealt. And the learning curve is fast because it builds on the first game: a fast learning curve on an already fast-to-learn game.
“Do you regret the Friday?” The goal of the game is to keep me playing. It kept me playing. It won. And I had a blast.
Compare this to yesterday, when I played the demo of the Backyard Baseball relaunch. The demo exists to make me play more. I loved Backyard Baseball as a kid. But the demo was… meh? After playing through it, I had no interest in playing the actual game. Slay the Spire slays. Backyard Baseball flops.
[1] This is the sort of hyperbole permitted to we practitioners of the creative arts. I also installed an A/C unit in my apartment and coached a client for ~2 hours and went to the gym. But I did play Slay the Spire for upwards of 8 hours.
Julian Wise 