As an adult, life is very intrusive most, if not-all, of the time. Back when we were younger, we used to dream about playing video games every day. But then reality hit us hard. Suddenly, we had no time to play anymore because of work, responsibilities and relationships.

As much as we want to play more of Cyberpunk 2077 or Red Dead Redemption 2, they just feel... too much. I can't explain it fully but it's kind of tiring, no?

If you understand what I'm trying to say, I think you might like this game I'm trying to present. And that game is...

Slay the Spire

According to its wiki

Slay the Spire is a game in which you climb The Spire, ascending its floors through three acts (four acts if you collect the keys), encountering many enemies, bosses, and events along the way. The paths through each act all lead to a final floor where a challenging boss encounter awaits. The content of each floor and the available paths through each act are procedurally-generated, so each run will be a different experience.

Sounds simple, right?

Just climb, fight, and repeat. Perfect for us! We don't need to be immersed in the setting, the lore, the story and all that privilege that young people with a lot of time has.

But if it’s that simple, won’t we get bored? Two words.

HELL NO. And I say that with full confidence!

I currently have around 400+ hours on this game already. I know it's not that high, but it's high enough for me who can only play around or less than an hour a day!

Let me explain it a bit more.

The Gameplay

At its core, Slay the Spire is a roguelike deck-building game. The main loop is to defeat the enemies each room until we get to the final boss. Our movements are based on what cards we have and we can play those cards depending on the energy we have.

Each room we defeat, we get a chance to get more cards, increasing our options on what we can do.

If you're new to deck building games or you don't like them very much, it might sound a bit complicated at first so I won't go into the technical details but that's basically the overview of the game.

But that's not the fun part of the game. The really fun part is on its Cards and Relics.

The Cards

Cards provide the main action your character can do. Think of it as your moves. Currently, there are more than 730 cards in total!

I'm gonna be honest, I wasn't a fan of deck builder games before but I gave this game a chance and I got hooked.

Most of us, when we think of card games, we think of Yu-Gi-Oh or Magic which are very complicated (but still fun in their own way). But this one as you can see, the cards very simple to learn.

What I appreciate most is the quick information it provides for its effects. In the previous image above, the card will Apply 1 Weak but what does Weak actually do? Well, hover over the card and it provides the description!

I really like the way they handled the cards' descriptions as well. It's so straightforward and minimal which is very friendly for people who doesn't really play card games that much.

But having many cards can only do so much. If the game only relied on that, no matter how much card they add, it'll still get boring eventually.

Enter Relics.

The Relics

Relics are kind of like the items or equipment of the character. It synergizes with the effects of the cards we play. It's located on the upper left of the screen. Similar to cards, we get relics after some tough fights.

We can hover over it for a description on what it does. This is where it gets interesting. See the Tingsha from the image above? It says whenever we discard, we deal 3 damage. Sounds a bit... meh, right?

Well what if we used this card below?

The Storm of Steel card discards my hand and guess what, I have 6 cards in my hand aside from that.

That means I can do 6 x 3 = 18 damage in a single turn!

And that's not even the best part, It also says Add 1 Shiv+ for each discarded card, that means I can also have 6 Shivs which costs 0 and deals 6 damage! That is just awesome.

See, its simple things like these which make this game so fun. It's so simple to play but when you get sucked in it, it's so satisfying!

Summary

I don't want to make this longer than it has to be so I'll get right to the point. I talked about having no time to play because of adulting stuff but what makes this game different?

The main thing that made me recommend this game for adults like us is because of its simplicity yet deep mechanics.

You have a 5-minute break from work? Fire this baby up and play for 5 minutes! You don't need to know the lore or stress over what part of the game you're in or something like. Just jump right in, check your cards and play away!

And I almost forgot to mention, this game is also available in Android and IOS!

So you literally can play this game anywhere and anytime.

Side Note

Everything that I mentioned in here are only on the surface-level. This game has a LOT more depth to it. I only mentioned one type of deck which is the Discard deck but there are a lot more builds available.

I also didn't really talk much about its lore / story but this game has some lore behind it as well!

All I'm saying is, don't limit the game to what you know after reading this article. At the end of the day, it's really best to try it out yourself!

If you managed to read until this part, thank you so much for your time and I hope you enjoy the game!~