Recent reviews by arikado

Honestly, just a lot of fun learning the pattern in pointdevice mode. I only finished ReisenP thus far on my first, nearly 3 hours long run, but that one was definitely fun.


But seeing 60+ attempts on a spellcard hurts just a bit still.. Q.Q

Well, seems like I can't stop playing for a while

Slay the Spire is a roguelike cardgame which starts you out as one of 4 characters at floor 0 of "The Spire". On your way to the Spires top you have to fight, gamble and strategize your way through encounters of fate and battle. Each run ranges from 15 to 90 minutes depending on how fast and loose you like to play.
You advance through a map consisting of 6 different nodes with each node representing a floor:
Restsites allow you to "Smith" and "Rest" (the latter restoring 'HP')
?-Rooms can contain enemies or lore-related events that can alter your playstyle, for example by cursing you or by allowing you to test your luck in a game of stop the wheel.
Shops, which also can appear in ?-Rooms, house the merchant, selling you cards, relics, potions and a card removal feature for gold.
The last 3 type of nodes are made up by Enemies, Elites and Bosses, which have to be fought:
Battle is turnwise, you see the action the enemy wants to take, usually attacking you for X damage.
Your hp is carried inbetween fights so you have to "Block" this damage and then "Attack" the enemies to deplete their hp. You do those (and many more) actions by playing cards on a mana-per-turn basis with powerful relics helping you out. Relics can be aquired from Elites and Bosses, and after every combat you may choose one of three cards to take into your deck.





All in all, experimenting within the game feels fun. Losing isn't too frustrating, even if sometimes just being unable to build that one dream combo, or losing because one bad draw makes you upset. Finally getting together a strategy and beating the always evolving Spire is awesome though.

I cannot recommend this game with a QWERTZ keyboard...

other than that it's quite fun

Hmm... Been a while. By now I wouldn't say I don't recommend this game anymore. Weak points get weaker, strong points get stronger. You can definitely have your fun with this game, but, especially for completionists, there is a lot of unnecessary frustration involved.
Old review:
So... with 1.3 dropping, I thought I'd update my review.
The game has gotten a lot better, but it still has some major flaws. Should these be adressed like most of the others were I will change my mind on the whole "not recommended" thing.


So lets start... what stayed bad?
Controls still work against you. Controler is still highly recommended, as playing with a keyboard actively lowers game quality due to missing possibilities. And the games fludidity suffers from your own stunlocks on even minor misssteps.

Balance: Major improvements, but not quite enough.A lot of the bad weapons are now usable, but there are still some weapons that are way too slow or just too gimmicky. It's not rare for me to just pass up much higher rarity simply because it's a 1/10000 usecase where other weapons still are better. Similiarly there are superpowers called Mutations that should help you. Some are awesome and make whole playstyles viable. Some are along the lines of "You can use X more often the less you use X", which ends in a net neutral, some mutations Y would be perfect for X, but X scales with a mutually exclusive stat to Y, meaning you're left with a bad base value on Y.


Clarity:
A lot of ingame info is misleading or simply wrong. E.g. "Yolo" : Safes you ONCE from death if picked up. Cannot be dropped later" -
except it's not saving you if you're cursed, which is a MAJOR part of the game (sadly). Also has to be picked up in the first possible location or else just locks itself, which it doesn't tell you anywhere.

Then there are Timed-Doors and Kill-Doors.
Timed Doors are basically for speedrunners to not fall too far behind and are fine as is imo.
Kill-Doors require you to kill 60 enemies without getting hit in any given level. With about 100-150 you often get a MAX of 2 tries, sometimes just 1 and failing at 58 feels so frustrating. 2 more and you would've maybe gotten something to win the run with. Now you get nothing and because you nearly made it there aren't even enemies around anymore to fight.
I'd rather have them make it a "kill all enemies" door or similiar, forces you to actually play the game and challenge everything. Risk vs reward instead of "Slip up and get nothing".

And now... lets get to the stuff that has actively improved:
Difficulty: Back in 1.0, the games difficulty basically was:
"If you make 1 mistake, the enemies might 1 shot you". That's it. Play perfect for 55 minutes and screw up at the last second and there is no difference to barely scraping by.

Enemies are now often faster, crowd you more and are in general more diverse, but most of the time don't 1 shot you anymore from full life, making playing much more skill intensive and way less of a consistency check - for the most part.

Curses are still in the game - take 1 damage from any source (including selfdamage) and it's over. Not fun, artificial difficulty. I'd rather have curses last twice at long and increase the difficulty, instead of these short bursts of "you can't play the game"
The Malaise still is in the game too, but has been reworked so it's not a "get hit X times and instant death" anymore, which makes it an actually fun and engaging part of the gameplay.

This is mainly discussing the differences between now and when I first wrote my review (too long to keep the old review listed here), so it's rather negative in total, but believe me when I say it used to be MUCH worse.

I still think the games frustrating aspects overshadow it's good points, but whats left listed here is not that hard to fix and should they do that I will gladly recommend the game. Maybe there are mods that allow you to fix these flaws. You can have fun with this version of the game too and it's not a completely bad game anymore, but there is still a lot of unnecessary frustration which you probably wouldn't have in other games.

Finally you can enjoy Touhou here in the West without having to ship it to ya, which may even be impossible for some of us :/.

As for newcomers who may wonder if they want it:

Touhou is a rather challenging bullet-hell game. The story of each part is mostly self-contained, meaning that you can start at Hidden Star in Four Seasons. English-patches will very likely be avaible very soon. (They are getting worked on as I write this review), however, you can play this game without understanding a thing. You shouldn't, but you can. You'll be playing a young lady who's trying to make her way through bullets from all sides, utilizing her own attacks and bombs. The game is fairly short in itself, however due to the difficulty, newcomers probably will need a few weeks to beat it, especially considering there are multiple difficulties from easy to lunatic to extra, with Lunatic and Extra being one hell of a ride.

This DLC gives ya pretty OP Processor parts. Keep in mind that, if you don't want to play with the parts, you'll need to unequip them everytime a charakter joins your party, that can wear these. However, especially for postgame/DLC-areas, they are a good addition.

Awesome game

Awesome game.

The Beginning is a bit rough, but by the time you finished the game it's very likely all long forgotten. Awesome game.