Introduction
Slay the Spire (StS) is a deck-building roguelike by Mega Crit Games. Players face waves of enemies to progress through several acts, fighting a boss at each act. The art in StS is relatively simple, and card art designs are created by fans. Albeit having a relatively simple story and almost no game progression, StS managed to capture the hearts of its fans via unique deck-building strategies and “ascension” mechanics, garnering Overwhelmingly Positive reviews on Steam.

Story
StS has a relatively simple story: simply climb to the top of the spire. The player uses 1 of 4 characters and climbs up a spire full of enemies. Each enemy requires different forms of strategies to fight, making each fight a unique experience. Player progress through the tower in 3 “acts”, with a boss fight occurring at the end of each act. At the end of Act 3, the player may unlock a hidden Act 4, which contains the true boss of the game: the heart of the spire itself.

Aesthetics
StS a fantasy world with unique-looking characters, and a simple User Interface for users to track their cards and enemy actions. 2D graphics are used throughout the game, with only occasional particle effects from animations. The music gives off a serious feel, immersing the player in a dangerous and intense climb up to the top.

Technology
StS uses the libGDX Engine. The gist of the game is a single-player card game, where different cards have different effects, such as dealing damage, gaining armour, or dealing buffs/debuffs/other effects. While enemies do not have cards, they perform certain actions, either randomly or in a set pattern, depending on the enemy faced. Backgrounds and sprites simply follow a set animation. As it doesn’t render 3D graphics, lighting/shadows etc, the game runs very smoothly on most systems.

Gameplay

Though the Aesthetics, Technology and Story may be relatively simple compared to other games in the market, StS’s mechanics is where it shines.

Core Gameplay Loop
Players progress through each act by choosing a route towards a boss, either fighting normal opponents or mid-bosses, visiting shops, healing up or encountering random events. Each node has its fair share of risks and rewards, depending on the player’s risk appetite and deck requirements. To unlock the final boss, the player is also required to collect 3 keys scattered across the maps, adding an additional layer of challenge should they want to do so.

As the player completes a run, the player can choose to increase the difficulty, known as Ascensions, up to a maximum of 20 times, each ascension level introducing a new type of challenge. This is the main form of progression the game offers.

Characters, Cards and Relics
Each of the four characters offers widely different strategies for players to scale the spire. For example, The Ironclad focuses on brute force and solid defences, and the Silent focuses on Damage over Time and flurries of attacks. Each battle can reward new cards and relics, which form a strategy over time. Players can also cut/buy cards at shops to better refine their decks.

Over time, if done right, players can possibly create satisfying broken combos which blast through even the hardest of enemies.

The lens of Problem-Solving
Throughout each run, players are given randomly generated maps, relics and cards. As such, players would have to work with what they currently have or may get in the future. They are forced to think about what kind of strategy they want to build, what cards to keep, and what kind of node to travel to next. The randomness of the risks and rewards causes every run to require a different strategy from the previous ones.

Even during each battle, the problem-solving nature of the game is present: As the player’s hand gets redrawn every turn, players would have to work with what they have that turn and think of how best to use their current hand and find a balance between defence and offence.

The lens of Skill vs Chance
Though the randomly generated maps, cards etc may cause StS to seem very dependent on luck and chance, the game has an incredibly high skill ceiling involved. For example, deck sizes and the proportions of cards in the deck can vastly improve your chances of getting good hands every turn. Managing one’s health and gold, as well as strategizing the best path taken to maximise resources is also an instinct that is gradually developed as one plays through the game multiple times.

Given enough skill, players have beaten the game at maximum difficulty (Ascension 20) up to 20 times in a row, as seen below. As a baseline, many are already happy with beating the game at just the base difficulty.

The lens of Simplicity vs Complexity
StS has a fine balance of simplicity and complexity, as each run can be as complex as a player wants it to be. The player can opt to play a simple “ooga booga, me hit enemy” build relatively easily, by just picking the cards that allow them to do so. However, if the player feels up to the challenge, they can instead go for much more complex builds like Silent Grand Finale, Watcher Infinite Mantra, etc…

Both simple and complex decks are capable in clearing the game if built right. Nevertheless, a base level of complexity is still present in the core gameplay; any deck can fail to climb the spire if not built well.

The lens of Pleasure
The game does not make it easy for players to build an optimized deck. Yet, there is an indescribable pleasure when everything finally clicks. Many fans play for the possibility of building up a complete, optimized deck and watching it decimate everything in its path.

Conclusion

Overall, despite not having a story or much game progression, which is usually the core aspect of many roguelikes, Slay the Spire brings deck-building to a whole new level, allowing it to remain the most popular card-based roguelike to date.

Minecraft. That’s probably all the introduction this game needs. You do 2 things. Mine to gather resources, and then you craft your resources together to progress further. The limits set by the developers: your imagination.

The first thing that strikes you as soon as you load into a Minecraft world is how seemingly endless the world feels. While lacking in story perhaps, the game is a blank slate. A place where you can create your own, and the way the game doesn’t put any restrictions on you is simply unmatched. The game that got me into programming, but that’s a story for another day.

First up: aesthetics. The game uses, by modern standards, extremely low-quality textures. Simple 16×16 pixel art makes up every voxel (called block) in the world you see. Yet, making such simple textures look good is far from easy. There is a fine balance between making sure that each block looks detailed, but not simplistic. While clearer, sharper lines may look like the texture is more detailed, it also lacks depth, making each block look flatter than their cube shape already make them do. Yet, blurring the textures too much makes them look, well, blurry. This fine balance was, and continues to be struck by Lead Pixel Artist at Mojang, Jasper Boerstra.

Of course, the aesthetics are not the only simple part. The mechanics of this game, are also deceptively simple. You use left click to break blocks or attack monsters, and right click to use or place items. However, that is before you factor in the vast number of items in the game. The game lures you in with simple, intuitive controls that are shared among any first person game. WASD for movement, space for jumping. Yet, as you progress further into the game, you find items like the water bucket, that add so much more depth to the mechanics to the game such as being able to nullify all falling damage by simply timing your right click and placing the water below you at the exact right time. This combination of simple inputs and items that change how your character interacts with the world are perfect for a game that really champions player regency and choice — the ideal sandbox game.

Story is something that Minecraft leaves (mostly) to the player. You are as free as you can be in the world, and all the goals for “completing” the game are optional. In fact, you are even allowed to skip all the progression and simply build yourself a town that has a story you yourself want to tell. In this vein, it is hard to find another game that gives you as much freedom, that lets you rebuild the world itself as you see fit.

Finally, technology. The reason that Minecraft is so popular is not simply because of the other 3 points, but that it fulfils all that without needing incredibly powerful hardware. Optimisations like only rendering faces of voxels that can be seen and the lower quality textures means that the game can be run on extremely old hardware, and can support a huge number of modifications if you have the proper hardware to run them. Each world is also run as a server, even single player ones, meaning that you can easily host a local game for friends when inviting them over in the game itself, without having to learn about how to setup game servers at all.

In Minecraft, the experience of the game really starts with surprise. The different sounds made and items dropped from breaking blocks. The recipes they unlock. The items you can derive from those objects. All these contribute to a sense of wonder, with each new block you find filling you with surprise as you wonder what comes next. The sheer amount of blocks in the game, along with yearly updates, means that even after years of playing the game, each time you boot up the game, there is a chance you discover something new, a different feature that maybe you never interacted with in your countless playthroughs of the game. This feeling of surprise is unmatched, and is incredibly simple to recreate for yourself. Just start a new world, and immerse yourself in an entirely new world, right from the beginning.

Where does the fun come in then? Well, the human brain loves rewards for completing tasks, and I feel like nothing else rewards you more than the sounds in the world you hear when you simply play the game. In Minecraft, each action immediately provides you with a satisfying audio feedback. The satisfying pop as a block breaks. The plop when you pick up an item. The cheerful, musical ding that plays when you pick up a bit of experience from killing a monster. The most genius part of the sounds in the game is that they never really repeat themselves. Each sound played is varied in pitch by a little, letting you feel the results of your actions, and rewarding you for each small action, making a normally tedious task like gathering resources seem like a fun activity.

Curiosity as well is something that the game encourages. Throughout most of its lifespan, the game has not had guides for most of its content. Information such as whether you can break a certain block is actively hidden from the player, forcing them to try different things and inadvertently steering them towards the infinite world as they break different items and put them together in different combinations in the crafting table to see what sticks (haha get it). A simple 3×3 crafting grid that lets you place items however you want lets players figure out how items are made on their own, with recipes for items to be crafted arranged in a manner that makes sense, while also rewarding you for experimentation and curiosity.

Of course, the game is not without its flaws. The problem solving required to “complete” the game by the developers’ standards has never really been made clear to the player. The surprise of finding something new is great, but only when it makes sense for the player to find out about that on their own. When the player is required to stumble into things that are not easily deduced from what we know about the real world that Minecraft is trying to emulate, we cannot force the player to use the same method of trial and error to simply find out recipes that make sense. It is in this aspect that Minecraft is lacking, but steps such as a recipe book that lets you know all the items you can craft with items that you have found before have made steps towards making this less of an issue.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1997040/MARVEL_SNAP/

Marvel Snap is a free-to-play digital card game for Windows, Android and IOS. Released on October 18 2022, the game won best mobile game of the year at the game awards. There are over 200 cards released, with new cards added regularly during updates. Former hearthstone developers were heavily involved in making this game.

Elemental Triad:

Even though there is not really a written story to this game, the mechanics, aesthetics, and technology work very well together to form a common theme.

Mechanics:

Unlike a typical game of lowering the opponent’s health bar, this 1 player versus 1 player card battler game has unique rules for winning. There are 3 locations which are areas where players can play their cards.  Each player can play cards to increase their power in the location. At the end of the game, the player with the highest power wins the location and the player with the most won locations wins the game.  A typical game lasts 6 turns and every turn a player has 1 more mana than the previous turn, starting with 1 mana in turn 1.

The rank progression system involves earning cubes. Win a full game to earn 2 cubes. If the opponent retreats, the player earns 1 cube. Double the cube gain or lost by snapping, which it is just pressing the cube icon at the top of screen. For every 10 cubes earned, the player enters a new rank and earns new rewards.

Aesthetics:

As a Marvel game, it features characters and locations from Marvel Comics Universal. The cards are beautifully drawn and there are art variants of all the characters to collect. The aesthetics are very well designed and fit into the theme, the superpowers of the heroes are reflected well in their card effects. Wolverine, who has healing powers in the comics, have a card effect that plays him if he discarded or destroyed. Animations for the effects are short and awesome to look at. The only lacking component is the music, as the game has the same one track.  

Technology:

The game runs smoothly on mobile and Windows. Even though the windows port could be improved further, as players have problems opening some inbox notifications.

Story:

There is no written story for the game. However, by playing the game, the player can interpret their own story. There are three locations, and the player sends heroes against other player’s heroes in those locations. Winning that location can make the player feel like they are heroes saving the city.

Lens of rules

With the unique rules for winning, comes wacky and interesting effects that can change the way you play the game.  From turn 1 to 3, one of the three locations will reveal its effect. The Bar with No Name has an effect of whoever has the least Power here wins. This discouraged players from playing cards with positive power here. Mindscape swaps hands with opponent, Weirdworld draws from your opponent’s deck, this can completely change your game plan. The Vault, Miniaturized Lab, Kyln, only allows player to play cards on certain turns, players need to plan and decide if they should give up or contest the location. Limbo adds turn 7 to the game and TVA ends the game at turn 4. This affects players with combo decks as they need to unleash their combos early or late. The rules of the game stay the same, but it feels different every game as locations and cards interaction changes the dynamics of the game. With over 30 locations and over 200 cards, the game has high replay value and tons of fun.

Lens of competition

Players build their own deck and come up with strategies to win the game. There are many different meta decks such as On Reveal, Ongoing, Zoo, etc. For example, there is a deck that is built around the Devil Dinosaur card. Devil dinosaur gains +2 power for each card in your hand. Moon girl duplicates cards in your hand. Playing them one after the other results in a powerful combo. This powerful combo can be countered by playing Enchantress which is a card that remove the Devil Dinosaur buff. Experienced players know their decks’ strengths and weaknesses. They can also tell what the opponent might be up to after a few turns. Knowing when to retreat and when to snap is crucial in climbing far high up the ladder.

Lens of visible progress

Collecting cards to add to the deck is an awesome part of progression. The game has battle pass and mission which gives the players free credits. Credits are then used to upgrade cards visually. The card upgrades goes like this: New Frame -> 3D art -> Animation -> Shiny Logo -> Animated Frame -> Purplish Animated Frame. As the player upgrades their cards, they gained collection levels which is used to unlock new cards. It feels amazing to add new card to the collection and I always cannot wait to see what new card I unlock next. However, there are controversy around how the latest cards are being added to the game. To unlock the newest cards, the player need to be at the very high collection level, and it is still up to chance to unlock it. Some calling this game the first uncollectable collectable card game.

Lens of play testing

The PVP card involves tons of play testing to balance the power of the cards. Cards such as Leader is extremely strong and requires little to no skills to play it. Nerfs and buffs to the digital cards are common and are expected. To ensure the game has longevity, the developers require constant feedback from the communities and players. Right now there are some locations which are generally unfun, such as Lechuguilla, Subterranea which shuffle useless rock into the player decks. Many players gave feedback about this, however the developers seemed to not take it into account. Time will tell if Marvel Snap will become a truly great card game or just live in the shadow of Hearthstone.