Recent reviews by im_robertb

The November 27th update deleted my save.

I was in one of the lightning-witch's dream missions, where you have two copies of her to control, in a level where she had to stop 6 enemies from sounding the alarm.

First play: The Breach Here button didn't do anything, and then the Rewind button removed all of the characters (friendly and enemy) from the map. So I went and hit Restart Level.

Second play: I got to Turn 2, to a point where I had the Gale Grenade selected. I could not deselect it, I could not select any other ability (buttons were enabled but clicking did nothing), I could not fire the Gale Grenade. Clicking Rewind did nothing, clicking Foresee/End Turn did nothing. So I quit to the main menu and found my saves were deleted.

I ran into serious technical issues, rendering the game all but unplayable.

Once you enter combat once, for the rest of the play session, certain essential menus (e.g. taking an order) display only a black screen. Quitting the game completely will resolve it... until you get into combat again. Checking the forums shows that this issue was reported years ago, and not addressed. Apparently you can workaround by playing in windowed mode, but I'm not going to spend time testing to make sure that that's the case, and then miss the refund window. That's a gamebreaking bug, they know about it, they haven't fixed it - refunded.

I have a rule for Early Access games: I only buy them if I want to play the current build, *right now*. I am rarely disappointed by my Early Access purchases, and Slay the Spire is no exception. It's a deckbuilding roguelike, where good play can probably get you a > 80% win rate, and where each run is at most 90 minutes - and once you get used to it, frequently under an hour.

One run is 3 acts, of ~16 nodes each (combat, elite combat, shop, rest, ?), and each act is capped off with a boss. There are ~3 different bosses for each act, so you'll have a good amount of variety from run to run, in terms of the challenges you face.

The deckbuilding elements are solid. There are a lot of card synergies, a good variety in builds, and the roguelike elements often have you adapting your build to what cards and relics come up - making do with what you've got.

There is not much of a campaign, but it's not an issue. The closest thing is Ascension mode, where each rank makes the game progressively harder, but also gives you a higher score. There are also the Daily runs, which have 3 mutators that change some of the fundamental rules of the game - those often end up wacky.

If you found Guild of Dungeoneering too light, you'll probably like Slay the Spire.
If you found the boardgame Mage Knight too heavy, you'll probably like Slay the Spire.
If you found Star Realms too short, you'll probably like Slay the Spire.

This is a faithful recreation of a tabletop game that had significant potential, but lots of problems.

The layout is excellent. Rules tablets, grid/snap points, diagrams for setup right on the table, and every object moving in just the way you want it to. This module makes excellent use of a lot of the convenience features Tabletop Simulator provides. The only exception is that each hero's Basic and Advanced feats are all in one unorganized deck together, even though at the start of every game, you'll want to separate them.

For better or for worse, the problems this module has are the same as those of the physical boardgame, namely, errata. So much major errata, you'll probably have to go to Google to set up your first game... and your second, and your third. Like the physical game, it feels like the "final" version of the rules was never playtested with the "final" version of the components, since there are several issues anyone paying attention could not fail to notice.

Mistfall has major problems that could have been fixed in playtesting, or even in this digital version, but weren't. For a lighter game, this might be forgiveable; for Mistfall, it takes an already heavy, complex experience, and makes it both confusing and contradictory.

When you set up your hero, you'll find cards you start with that have prices on them - ones that you should have to buy. You'll find equipment that you can't use. When you set up a quest, you'll be told to use a tile that doesn't exist, or you'll have contradictory instructions on the quest summary card vs. the quest rulebook. Even though the tablet just links to the PDF on the creator's website, the quest rulebook is still uncorrected. The summary cards refer to at least one step that isn't in the rulebook. Want to know how it works? Go to Google.

As I said, these are problems that also affect the physical version of the game, but that's what makes this DLC so disappointing. In a digital version of a game, it's easy to incorporate errata, but that simply hasn't been done. If it had, this would be an outright superior version of a boardgame that is plagued by unclear rules and incorrect components. Furthermore, it's clear that it's a problem of either lack of resources, or lack of motivation by NSKN Games, the publisher of the physical boardgame.

Errataed PDFs of the rulebook and questbook aren't included in this module... because they don't exist.
NSKN has put out images for errataed cards, but there are so many more incorrect cards than they've put out the images for... and even the corrections that do exist are not in this module.

If you own the tabletop game and want to play with your friends online, buy this DLC.
If you want a faithful, piece-by-piece recreation of the tabletop game, with Tabletop Simulator's convenience features added, buy this DLC.
If you want a version of Mistfall that is actually playable without great errata-induced frustration, do not buy this DLC. Until rulebooks are updated, and complete component erratas are included, no such version exists.