Slay the Spire

Slay the Spire combined a card game with a roguelike structure and essentially defined the entire deckbuilding roguelike genre, which after its success flooded the market with dozens of followers. The player climbs a tower full of enemies, and with each floor builds a deck of cards representing attacks, defense, and special abilities for four distinct characters, each offering its own playstyle and synergies. After each battle the player chooses a new card or relic, creating tension between immediately strengthening the deck and keeping it lean in the long run — a bloated deck full of unusable cards can kill just as reliably as a lack of power. There's also a choice of path between floors, so the player decides for themselves whether to risk an extra fight for a reward or head instead to a merchant or a rest site.

The Switch version arrived with a slight delay after the PC release and carried the game over without major compromises — controlling cards with Joy-Cons or the touchscreen feels intuitive, and the game is a great fit for handheld play in short sessions. The visuals are austere but functional, and the music underscores the atmosphere of a freezing, dangerous tower without unnecessary filler. Procedurally generated maps ensure no run is ever the same, and permadeath forces players into careful planning of every step — one poorly chosen card in the middle of a run can mean having to start the whole tower over again from floor one.

Both critics and the player community embraced the game enthusiastically already during its Early Access release, and the Switch port only expanded its fan base among handheld players. Slay the Spire is still considered one of the most influential titles of its decade — it taught the genre how to elegantly combine chance with deep strategic decision-making, and it remains the reference point against which every new deckbuilder is measured. Its building blocks, from relics to interlinked cards, have become the vocabulary used to describe dozens of genre followers to this day.

Why play: Anyone wanting to experience the title that taught an entire genre how to combine chance with deep strategic decision-making will find in Slay the Spire the reference point against which every new deckbuilder is still measured today.