malvasia bianca

Slay the Spire is a deckbuilding roguelike. And it’s a pretty good deckbuilder game! But, unfortunately, it’s still a roguelike, and one of the things I’ve learned over the last couple of years: I don’t like roguelikes, or at least I haven’t yet found one that I like.

Slay the Spire is the roguelike I’ve played that I like the most. But it has the same problem as other roguelikes I’ve played: the loop is just too long. A full run takes maybe an hour and a half, and that’s a problem for two reasons. One is that the learning loops are too long: it takes a while to learn how an experiment works out, and while there are multiple learning opportunities in a single run, the flip side is that the signal that you get out of a single run is also relatively unclear. And the other is that, if you just make a mistake in a level of the run, you can easily lose an hour of work for something that was just stupid.

Still, it’s a neat game. And it is possible to learn: I’ve gone through the game successfully with all three characters, it took me a while to come up with a successful strategy with the second and third characters, but I managed it. I had a more frustrating time trying it after that in Ascension mode: for some reason, even the lowest difficulty setting of Ascension felt quite a bit harder to me than in regular difficulty? But I also started trying out the daily challenges, and those provided a pleasantly different twist.

Definitely glad I played Slay the Spire. And I actually think I’ll probably return to it when I have free evenings, probably trying out a daily challenge? Heck, I might even go through that when finishing these posts. And it’s on the edge of being a reasonable learning curve for me: I feel like I’m in range of getting to where I can start succeeding more often, at which point the randomness starts turning into an interesting learning challenge.

But also: I continue to feel that roguelikes just aren’t for me…