Recent reviews by myldoo

I'm going to write this as a review, but also as a very broad new player guide, as I believe that understanding what it takes to be good at the game will help you understand why the game is good. Don't worry, i'm not going to ruin the fun of figuring the game out for yourself, I'm just going to go over the general thought processes this game encourages to show you why the game is so beloved.

STS is a roguelike deckbuilder. Roguelikes are random, and card games are random, so the game must be random^2, right? As random as these two genres are, the randomness of each of these components is heavily limited in many ways. The map generation follows certain rules and regulations, the enemy variety at each stage of the game is limited, and the card pool for each character is modest. Despite the seeming lack of variety, the game is full of interesting decisions because so much of the game is foreseeable. As you get familiar with the game, you'll find yourself being able to evaluate the strength of different cards with increasing accuracy as your understanding of the challenges in front of you deepens. If the game had 9 billion different enemies and cards, your choices would feel so much more meaningless and shallow. However, since the game was designed with restraint and predictability, as soon as you're offered your first choice of cards on the first floor, you'll often find yourself deciding between a card that is immediately strong, or a card that might be clunky now but could really pay off later. The card's you are offered are random, but you're always evaluating them against a predictable set of challenges.

A common piece of advice I see for new players is that they shouldn't think about building a certain archetype of deck, they should be thinking about picking cards that give them the tools they need to deal with the challenges in front of them. I'm bringing this up because its very easy to go into this game with the wrong mindset, which will ultimately be detrimental and frustrating for you. In order to be successful in slay the spire, you will have to stretch the definition of synergy with your card selections and come up with a swiss army knife of a deck that can meet the demands of any situation. You can't just pick all of the shiv spam cards that obviously work well together. If you do that, then the enemy that punishes you for spamming shivs will kill your run. Of course, a lot of people would like it if you could just pick the obvious synergy package and win every run, but those people would get bored of the game after a few runs because the card evaluation process would be as braindead as looking for cards that have keywords your deck already has. STS often encourages you to pick a card that might not fit perfectly with the rest of your deck because you need a solution for a tough enemy coming up. For example, one time I had a defect deck that was based entirely around his orb mechanic, but I knew that I had no way to scale them up to finish off a boss with a massive health pool, so I took a single copy of claw, a completely non-orb related card that gets stronger every time you play it during a fight, and relied solely on that to get my way through the boss. This wasn't a rare card, its a common and not even a particularly good one, but It did something the rest my deck didn't. Another great example of this sort of thing happening is when a top player named baalorlord picked clash, and everyone was like "wtf, why would you do that? Clash sucks ass!" baalorlord went on to win the run and set a world record for most wins in a row. If he did not pick that ♥♥♥♥♥♥ card, there's a very good chance he would have died. For the record, clash is pretty garbage.

Now that I've explained why i like the game so much, I need to be fair and say its not completely perfect. Getting through the first few floors can be kinda boring sometimes, there are a few regular enemies that are a little too punishing (♥♥♥♥ gremlin gang, snake plant, and the avocado guy), act 2 in general has a bit of a difficulty spike that could be tuned down whereas act 3 can often feel too easy as a final act, and a lot of the events that give you a curse in return for something good are rarely ever worth it because curses are just so horrible. That being said, those issues are fairly minor and the game is still one of my favorites of all time.

I hope this review was helpful and gave you some insight into why this game is loved by so many people.

Been playing since '08 and it's sad to see what this legendary game has become due to the bot crisis.

fps low and thats bad

boobs are a good size but there needs to be more sizes :/ gets boring