Slay the Spire is a game oozing with charm. The general style, the surprisingly in-depth world building about the spire, the simple weirdness of many of the enemies, or just the way the text during events move around all leave a great impression. However, this game has a glaring flaw in that you have almost no control over deck-building.
There are a ton of cards per character and at the end of every combat you pick one of 3 cards to add or ignore completely. the ignore completely is important to note because this game is all about the synergy so you'll definitely end up ignoring most of it. I basically decided it was just time for a refund when I went for a dark orb run on the robot only to die on the first boss with a nearly unmodified starter deck because I couldn't find even one dark orb card to get the deck started. This sort of thing could be heavily mitigated if you had any way of changing your starting relic (run modifiers you find along the way) or deck, but no, you of course can do no such thing. Also, it's worth noting that leveling up characters does nothing but unlock more cards which just increases the pool size, lol. It's nuanced and critical thing, but the ratio of card availability to card total is abysmal. Game-play is so one-dimensional it almost feels like a hyper-complicated slot machine.
It could be said that the fun is going with the flow (read: RNG) and finding the best deck out the options, but what's even 'game-play' about that? I'm not taking a back-seat to my own experience.

Slay the Spire is a game oozing with charm. The general style, the surprisingly in-depth world building about the spire, the simple weirdness of many of the enemies, or just the way the text during events move around all leave a great impression. However, this game has a glaring flaw in that you have almost no control over deck-building. There are a ton of cards per character and at the end of every combat you pick one of 3 cards to add or ignore completely. the ignore completely is important to note because this game is all about the synergy so you'll definitely end up ignoring most of it. I basically decided it was just time for a refund when I went for a dark orb run on the robot only to die on the first boss with a nearly unmodified starter deck because I couldn't find even one dark orb card to get the deck started. This sort of thing could be heavily mitigated if you had any way of changing your starting relic (run modifiers you find along the way) or deck, but no, you of course can do no such thing. Also, it's worth noting that leveling up characters does nothing but unlock more cards which just increases the pool size, lol. It's nuanced and critical thing, but the ratio of card availability to card total is abysmal. Game-play is so one-dimensional it almost feels like a hyper-complicated slot machine. It could be said that the fun is going with the flow (read: RNG) and finding the best deck out the options, but what's even 'game-play' about that? I'm not taking a back-seat to my own experience.