Don't Slay the Spire, slay the card fetish

Ugh. Another twelve-dollar game that would be overpriced at six.

I've never played Rogue and am not a fan of the roguelike, plotless, randomized dungeon crawling routine and I certainly would not bestow upon any such product the undeserved laurels of "role-playing" alongside such greats as Bloodlines, M&B, Tyranny or the Infinity Engine titles. But, nonetheless, I must concede Darkest Dungeon proved that tired old roguelike routine could be adapted to the finest modern standards. Slay the Spire blatantly piggybacks on the popularity of such other retro games with its side view and encounter lattice but builds nothing new upon it, expecting to sell based on its "indie" credentials simply for marketing to a niche market.

 

First off, you only get one mook, so say goobye to DD's strategic/tactical linear formations and position jockeying. Second off, the lattice branches very little with no backtracking, so you're mostly just clicking "next" as you work your way up. Third off, it's an hour or two's playthrough expecting you to just start over every time you die or reach the end, resulting in very much an '80s arcade experience. Fourth off, I should've recorded the above illustration as a .gif just to show the complete lack of movement animation and attacks displayed as slashes.

I accepted the lack of animations in WH40K: Armageddon, for instance, because it delivered on complex hex tactics.

I didn't mind the pixels, simplified lattices and short campaigns in Into the Breach because it played so well on positioning and terrain.

Hell, I could even respect Spacecom's honesty about its limitations and enjoy a few hours' worth of abstract strategy for my couple of bucks' investment. Points of light are still more dignified than bad graphics, but if you're going to pretend to put colorful monsters in your game, you'd damn well better come up with something more imaginative than a donut and a dreidel.

But Slay the Spire falls below even bush-league. It's one of those browser "free"-to-play sites meant to elicit addictiveness by a stream of rewards as reinforcement, sold offline for the price of a dozen Angry Birds or Fruit Ninjas. While, yes, it does boast gameplay variation via the various "cards" you pick up in lieu of loot or skill advancement, by the time I'd won my first playthrough these had already fallen into a predictable pattern of maximizing offense/defense to take advantage of multipliers. Legit, but also nothing you wouldn't get in more complex games for a lower price.

In closing, let's address this "card" idiocy, because it seems to be taking over the indie game scene. I hated "cards" as immersion-breaking adolescent feigned nonchalance in Star Ruler 2 six years ago and this bullshit hasn't waned in laziness and cheapness since. Yes, you could replace any piece of loot, any unit or any magic spell in RPGs or strategy with "cards" saying you done did the thing, with abstract tokens of action. I cast fireball. Congratulations on noticing the obvious. But part of the point of buying your fucking product is supposed to be you contextualizing such done things in a coherent, creative, artistically inspired fashion, NOT hitting me over the head with WE ARE PLAYING A GAME IS IT NOT GAMEY?!? The indie market is gradually getting choked with these computerized card/dice/board fetish products simply selling their hipster customers some imagined trend-bucking prestige via retro pixelation.

Substance? Fuhgeddaboutit.