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Impressions: Slay the Spire 2
For something that only happened due to a coin flip, I’d say the folks at Mega Crit have scored another, ahem, mega crit with Slay the Spire 2. And this is with it being Early Access!
As a veteran of slain spires myself though – 235 hours in Steam, likely 4x on mobile, A20 clears on all characters – my first impressions over eight hours in the sequel has been… weird. Strange, even.
Perhaps I should say: whelmed. I am very, very whelmed.
For starters, three of the original classes have made a return, along with the majority of their original cards. On the one hand, this is good. Why mess with success, especially when the theming and power fantasies were such a hit the first time around? On the other hand, as an OG fan, a lot of the novelty is already pre-digested. There are certainly new cards, and some of the original cards have been tweaked in different ways. But things don’t quite hit the same walking into your first Silent run knowing that you’re going to see Shivs, Poison, and Discard as primary synergies.
The other off-putting things at the moment is balance. Now, this is literally the first few days of an Early Access launch, and there will likely be (bi)weekly balance passes for the next year or longer before StS2 hits 1.0. My concern at this stage though, is that things certainly feel tuned to the level of infinite and/or bomb combos. It was always fun to stumbled into good combos in the original game, but it never felt completely necessary outside of an A20 Heart run; you could still feel reasonably confident heading into most encounters with merely a pile of mostly-good cards. Here in the sequel though, the average (non-Ascension!) encounter will be ready to deal like 35 damage to you right off the bat.
Again, we can imagine a world in which the devs tone down the overall enemy damage and player damage in tandem. But are they going to leave in the bombs? Look at Thrash+ in the picture above. By default, it will deal 6 + 6 damage, and then exhausts an Attack in hand. If that Attack was a standard Strike, not only is it doing you a favor by (temporarily) removing a bad card from your deck, the next time you draw Thrash+ you will be dealing 12 + 12 damage. Imagine instead it removed one that normally dealt 32 damage. How do you tone that down? Make Thrash deal 1 + 1 damage by default? Only add half the attack’s damage? It’s still a run-defining card.
…and maybe that’s OK? Getting the ole Corruption + Dead Branch was a (hilariously fun) run-defining combo in the original as well. All I’m saying is that I’ve scrubbed out on the first boss – and sometimes before then! – on some characters at zero Ascension by virtue of not seeing any bombs/combos. I’m just hoping that once things are tuned appropriately, the game doesn’t still feel so swingy.
Aside from all that, the rest of the game looks very impressive. Some of the card art, in particular, is amazing. Unlocks are governed by an “Epoch” system which are basically achievements plus some worldbuilding elements. Speaking of worldbuilding… well… yeah. Less is more, and more is less. Some elements felt cool to read about (Silent taking back a piece of the Heart) and other bits kind of made the world feel less cool. I didn’t need to know the world is named Preon and is “that which tells stories,” for example. This could be placeholder text too, who knows.
Anyway, I suppose a lot has changed in the last eight years. Would Slay the Spire 2 have blown me away in 2018? Of course. Is it blowing me away right now? Ehh. I’ll do a few more runs with the characters that haven’t beaten Act 3 yet, and give the devs some more time to cook.
Impressions: Craftopia
A lot of developers, even in the indie space, like to play things safe. Even if the genre is something out of left field, a lot of the basic game design still feels like +10% skill bonus here, clearly defined tutorial there. Early Access is treated as a soft launch – which it definitely is – of the final product instead of an opportunity to just go nuts.
Meanwhile, Craftopia is the nuts. I don’t remember the last time I played something where you could just feel the devs sitting around a whiteboard saying “That sounds cool, let’s try it out.” And since the team is from Japan, they are already coming at design from sometimes extra weird angles.
On the face of it, Craftopia is… well, let me just post this from the Steam store page:
Craftopia is the brand new multiplayer open-world survival action game.
We have imagined what would happen when we combine our favorite video games altogether.
Chop trees and mine stones as in Sandbox,
Explore the world as in Open-world,
Fight the hunger as in Survival,
Cultivate and harvest as in Farming,
Collect loots in dungeons as in Hack-and-slash,
Automate activities as in Factory management,
Hunt monsters and creatures as in Hunting action,
Cast magical spells as in Fantasy RPG.Now we have a utopia for all of us. That is Craftopia.
After destroying the world in the opening credits, your character emerges from a tutorial cave and you can basically do whatever you want. The game looks like Breath of the Wild and/or Genshin Impact, including the ability to gecko-climb up every surface from the get-go (and build a glider soon after). Following the breadcrumb quests will take you to some NPCs and a small town where you can get acquainted to the crafting. The thing to know is that you can basically build anywhere, which will be important later.
Before the big Seamless World update in late June, the game was basically a series of instanced islands and you needed to unlock things to open portals to other places. Now, you can basically go anywhere you want right off the bat, although you will of course encounter higher-level enemies the farther afield you explore. One of the principle progression mechanics is unlocking special pillars across the landscape using crafted goods. Once you supply the necessary ingredients and then press the button at the top of the resulting pillar, you progress the “Age” and unlock new crafting possibilities.
Let me talk about the pillar for a second though, because it was amazing to me. I supplied the ingredients and then it shot up into the sky. I started climbing the pillar, which is something you can just do, but I started getting nervous halfway up because the ledges were very tiny and, admittedly, the game has a lot of jank. So I threw down a wood platform so I wouldn’t fall off. And then I slapped my forehead with the realization that I could have just built a spiral staircase to reach the top. Which I then did. There’s a floating island you need to reach to get some upgrades, and I presumably would have learned that lesson had I done that earlier, but whatever.
Aside from the crafting aspect, there is a lot of experimentation in the Skill trees as well. You can choose to use Magic of various flavors, enhance your normal weapon attacks, unlock basic movement skills like double-jump, and more. When I played, a large portion was simply unselectable placeholders, but what exists is plenty inventive and makes me feel excited for the possibilities. One Skill lets you throw a knife and then teleport to that location. I was a tad disappointed that its range is limited, but it reminded me how much fun I had with Rogues in WoW with Grappling Hook and Shadowstep.
Also, apparently there is an entire Pokemon element in the game wherein you can capture and breed anything in the game, including NPCs (!!), and ride them into battle (!?!). Actually, I haven’t tried to see if you can ride the NPCs, but I have ridden a cow and what looked like a Shy Guy from Mario 2, so I wouldn’t be surprised.
Also also, there are dungeons with traps and boss fights. Building is more limited inside, but there was a sequence where you had to come up with something to avoid fireball turrets and infinitely falling giant iron balls that roll down the main ramp. I hesitate to call the boss combat Soulslike, but you do need to dodge and counter-attack at precise moments to avoid damage. Or summon a bunch of pets/NPCs and spam attacks? Didn’t try that, personally, but maybe it would work.
What I will say though, is that currently Craftopia has a lot of jank. Like, a lot a alot. When I played, damn near half of the NPC dialog was in untranslated Japanese, and what was in English was very clearly machine-translated. According to one patch note the untranslated dialog was due to a bug, but let’s just say that this isn’t exactly an AA game experience at the moment. It certainly is A game experience, and definitely a BBB game if I ever saw one.
And that’s fine. What I love about Craftopia already is that it can improve in so many different ways and directions from here. That sounds like a backhanded compliment, perhaps, but my point is that these guys threw the entire box of spaghetti at the wall, instead of just a normal amount. With what they got going on so far, I am not worried about them necessarily cutting features and/or nerfing certain builds into the ground. Which means we could just have fun for once in completely unique ways. How many times does that happen?
The one negative I’ll say is that it’s difficult to justify playing exactly right now. For one thing, there is apparently some kind of critical Save Game bug, which is about the worst thing that can happen with a survival-crafting game. But more than that, I worry about playing through things, getting my fill with the novelty, and then them releasing a whole bunch of new elements that I don’t get to experience because I’ve moved on. That’s a Me problem, 100%, but it’s there. The roadmap suggests that an official release may come in or after September, which isn’t too far away, and may be just as well considering that’s when Starfield comes out.
But overall, if you want to experience a game where it feels like almost anything can happen, Craftopia is where it’s at.
In An Age 