Slay The Spire is a deckbuilding roguelike game released in November of 2017, so it normally would be considered an “outdated” or “irrelevant” game… HOWEVER, Slay The Spire has an extremely satisfying gameplay loop, which will always have you come back to finally slay the Spire.
Slay The Spire base gameplay involves you progressing through the mysterious spire by fighting dangerous monsters, encountering weird and not always helpful individuals, and building your card deck of moves to beat the heart of the spire. The cards are the core of STS, with different characters having their own cards, but they all share the base attack and block cards. In combat you start with 3 energy to play your cards, and you will have to plan out your attacks and blocks so that you can minimize your damage taken while also quickly beating your enemies as many will grow in power the longer a fight goes on.
Slay The Spire has four unique characters that each have their own unique playstyle. Each character has 75 unique cards, and each card has a purpose, and can work with other cards. The first character you play as is the Ironclad, a mysterious warrior who uses a mix of huge damage attacks and blocks. His playstyles can range from making enemies vulnerable to finish them off with multiple weaker attacks, to gaining huge amounts of block and then turning that into an attack. The second character available is the Silent, a deadly assassin who uses poison, shivs, and martial arts to weaken and protect herself. I’ve had runs with the Silent where I only use poison and defense cards to block damage while my enemies wither away from exponentially growing poison, and I’ve also had runs with her where I constantly flood my opponents with 0 energy shivs.
The third character, the Defect who is a broken robot, is one of my favorite’s, even if they’re a bit complicated at first. Their gameplay revolves around creating elemental orbs to one of your orb slots, then creating more to evoke your existing orbs. There are 4 orb types, lightning which will deal passive damage at the end of your turn then huge damage when evoked, ice which will passively give a small amount of block at the end of your turn and a huge amount when evoked, darkness which will passively gain value at the end your turn then will deal all that accumulated damage when evoked, and finally there is plasma which will give you a extra energy at the start of your turn and will give you 2 energy when evoked.
The fourth and final character is the Watcher, a mystical martial arts master who switches between rage and calm stances to double and mitigate damage. Rage stance doubles ALL attack damage, which means your foes will also deal increased damage to you. Calm stance gives you two extra energy when you exit the stance. My favorite strategy with the Watcher is to hit enemies with the card fury of blows, a 0 cost card which returns to your hand when you change your stance, so if you fill your deck with fury of blows and stance change cards you can just constantly be dealing damage to your opponents while also making sure you don’t end your turn in rage stance, which is really bad. (Most enemies already do huge damage, so doubling it can be incredibly fatal especially later on.)
All in all, Slay The Spire is a unique and fun game that can alleviate hours upon hours of boredom. It is also on every platform, including mobile, so you can play on the go. It’s about $20 on everything but mobile where it is $10.