ive had a research project on hold about the history of this genre (cant believe they didnt mention dreamquest!) but more from a gameplay evolution perspective and it really never occurred to me how efficient they are in production terms. good article! if anyone has more like this give it to me i crace citations

I think the above article is good but I think it misses a bit what made Slay the Spire the groundbreaking game in this genre: careful attention to balance.

The article does correctly highlight that replayability is a defining feature of what makes these games successful, but replayability is not something you can take for granted, even for a rogue-like game!

The problem with a lot of rogue-like games is that after you play them for a while you sort of "solve" the game and the replay value is lost. Even though a rogue-like game is technically random, they're usually designed in such a way that there are a few well-known paths to victory (often referred to as "win conditions"). Once you know what all the win conditions are the game gets much easier, despite all the randomness, and loses a lot of the appeal. You can crank up the difficulty all you want on a game like that and it doesn't really make it more interesting (just more frustrating).

So what did Slay the Spire do right that other games didn't?

Punishing win conditions

One thing Slay the Spire got right is that it actually really downplays the importance of these win conditions. Instead, what you will find is that on higher difficulty levels most of the time you have to craft a carefully multi-faceted and nuanced strategy and not just lean hard into one strong play.

Slay the Spire actually goes out of its way to punish many common win conditions to discourage people from leaning too hard on them. A lot of fights in Slay the Spire are specifically designed to destroy one-dimensional decks, like:

• Time Eater

  This is a boss fight that specifically punishes decks that "go infinite" (i.e. they try to play an unlimited number of cards each turn). Time Eater has a Time Warp that ends your turn every 12 cards plays, which is very punishing in general, but exceptionally punishing for this sort of deck style (or even adjacent deck styles like decks that focus on heavy acceleration even if they don't necessarily go infinite).

• Corrupt Heart

  This is a boss fight that punishes decks that rely on massive damage amplification (e.g. Limit Break+) as their path to victory. The Corrupt Heart's Invincibility ability prevents you from dealing more than 200 damage (on Ascension level 19+) per turn (and the heart has 800 health), so you need to have a more well-rounded deck that can survive the Corrupt Heart's onslaught instead of trying to take out the heart in one quick cheap shot.

• Awakened One

  Powers that grant permanent buffs are very strong in Slay the Spire … except when they're not! The Awakened One has a Curiosity ability that buffs its strength by 2 (on Ascension level 19+) for every power you play, which is extremely punishing for power-hungry deck archetypes.

• Taskmaster or 3 Sentries elite fights

  Some decks rely on heavy card removal to craft a really tight deck with just a few cards that they can draw reliably every turn, but these decks fail really hard against a few fights. In particular, elite fights that add a lot of status cards to the deck cause these sorts of decks to crash and burn hard, so in order to survive these fights you need to craft a larger and more flexible deck instead of focusing on just a few cards.

Basically, for any simplistic path to victory there's going to be at least one fight that punishes that strategy, so you have to be much more flexible about how you approach winning the game and your deck needs to do multiple strong things at a time.

Balance tuning

The devs are constantly tuning the balance of the game based on which strategies are successful and which are not. There are still a few cards in the game which are stronger than others (like the Offering card depicted in the above article, which is one of the stronger Ironclad cards), but generally speaking the cards feel pretty balanced and lot of the card reward decisions in the game are interesting and don't have obvious right choices, even when you think your deck is settling into a certain deck archetype, because of …

Strategic diversity

The playable characters and their respective cards are designed to promote lots of deck archetypes, each of which overlap substantially with one another, so you're not really locked into a particular strategy and there are lots of viable strategies.

Moreover, the game is designed in such a way that you often don't really know what your path to victory is until late in the game. In particular, each new Act increases the difficulty markedly so things that were strong in the last Act are no longer quite as relevant, so you have to be mentally prepared to take the deck in new directions all the time.

Clever interactions between mechanics

The game has really well-thought-out mechanics that interact in really neat ways. As you play, you will keep discovering new ways that these mechanics interact. Similarly, when I watch strong Slay the Spire players stream I still learn all sorts of tricks and combinations that I never knew about before.

For example, a mechanic I never appreciated until I started watching streamers was the trick of combining Speed Potion or Flex Potion with an Artifact charge. Normally these potions give a temporary strong burst of Strength or Dexterity that wears off after one turn, but with an Artifact charge the "wear off" effect is cancelled and the effect becomes permanent for the remainder of the fight. It's a very strong interaction that completely unlocks entirely new strategies and paths to victory, like this run of mine where I used this combination twice as part of my path to victory.

But even when you discover these new mechanics they are strong but not game-breaking. For example, combining Speed Potion with an Ancient potion (that grants an Artifact charge) would be strong because of the above mechanic except for one small detail: on Ascension Level 11+ you can only carry two potions! That means that you can only use that combination once and until you use it you can't store or use any other potions …

… unless you get a Potion Belt (which is what the above run did), and then now you've got the beginning of a path to victory. But again, it helps but it's only one part of a winning strategy. In the above run that just meant that I could essentially win two fights for free (which is a big deal), but picking which two late-game fights to spend them on (and also winning the other late-game fights without those potions) was an important part of the strategy. For example, I had a heavy acceleration deck archetype (with literally 4 Offering+ cards) that was weak against Time Eater, so I decided to spend one pair of potions on that fight and even then it was a very narrow victory.

Conclusion

All of these things add up to create a game that has immense replay value. I'm 2000+ hours into this game and still learning so many new things about how to improve my strategy and to master this game. That's what distinguishes Slay the Spire from your generic rogue-like game.