
Outside of cards, you can also find consumable Potions that give you temporary boosts, but the really exciting pickups are the Relics.
Ascension slay the spire free#
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. 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. I couldn’t help but laugh because, win or lose, that combo may never show up again. Not because it’s exceptionally funny – though its well-written encounters can be that – but because some combo of cards that had chanced its way into my hand would just go off, and the result was an absolute thrill. Slay the Spire is one of those games where I found myself sitting alone at my desk just giggling as I played.
