You just need to survive.Īnd yes, I am going to make a clumsy analogy here, buckle up: I feel like Slay The Spire's gentle insistence that you should probably take care of yourself before you try to slay monsters is a pretty useful lesson in general. But sometimes, that's all you need - the next room could heal you, buff you, make you stronger or more resilient in some way. All you get is the reward of making it to the next room. You don't get bonus points for being fast or efficient. The thing about Slay The Spire so far is that it's not a race at all. Sometimes all you can do is do your best to block damage, so you can make it to the next room, or the next day It's tempting to use all three energy points to use my cool damagey cards, but slow and steady wins the race, so instead I use two of the energy points to defend, and the remaining one to attack, slowly whittling down the enemy HP. I have just three "energy" per turn, and I can use that to hit, defend, or use various other unique cards that increase stats, decrease enemy stats, and so on. Where I would normally hit hard and take just as much damage in return, I'm instead having to spend a large part of my turns mitigating the damage instead. It's this genius thing where I actually try to nullify the attacks before they're even made, instead of tanking the damage like usual.Īnd surviving means taking things slow. So I'm having to try something new, even though it's not new to most people, and that tactic is something I like to call "actually caring about defence". I am no strategist, most of the time I am merely a spiky tank, content with swapping damage for damage as long as I come out victorious.Īnd that just does not work in turn-based deckbuilder games like Slay The Spire. In RPGs, I'll usually take a rogue or DPS build, because those allow me to hammer on the "attack" button until my enemies keel over in defeat. In most strategy games, my usual tactic is just trying to get things over with as quickly as possible, filling up my list of attacks with whatever does the most damage, and hoping that I'll only have to make a few moves to kill my opponent dead. My usual tactic is just trying to get things over with as quickly as possible In roguelikes and deckbuilders, slow and steady might not win the race (i.e., a speedrunning tournament) but it certainly wins the game. (Oh, and if you're not sure what I'm talking about, check out the Backlog Club introduction I wrote a couple of weeks ago. Slay The Spire - the choice for Backlog Club this week - is one of those, and a damn fine one it is. The fable of the tortoise and the hare only works because the hare takes a nap! The hare deserved to win by virtue of being much, much faster, and the nap had nothing to do with whether or not the tortoise was good at racing.Īll of this preamble is to say that I've had to re-examine my need for speed in the face of roguelike deckbuilders, a genre that I'm very much enamoured with. I think it's a stupid sentiment, even if there is a nugget of truth in it: Take time, and be careful, and you'll get better results. I don't believe in "slow and steady wins the race". This is the halfway point, the Part One of two, where we stop for a minute to check in with the game, and how much we're enjoying it.įor the month of April 2022, we're playing Slay The Spire! Not to completion, necessarily, but we'll try to give it a fair whack all the same. This article is part of our new experimental series, Backlog Club, where we (Nintendo Life!) pick a game that's likely to be on our list of "games we should get around to playing", and then we (NL + you!) spend the next month playing that game.
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