I have a confession that anyone who’s touched the original will understand immediately: I sat down to “check a few things” in Slay the Spire 2 and lost an entire evening. That’s the whole review, really. But since you probably want more than that, let me explain why Mega Crit’s follow-up has its hooks in me so deep — and why “it’s just more Slay the Spire” is both completely true and wildly underselling what’s going on here.
Let’s get the obvious out of the way. This is not a reinvention. The original Slay the Spire didn’t invent the roguelike deckbuilder, but it’s the reason the genre exploded, spawning a hundred imitators over the years. Mega Crit could have played it safe, and in a sense they have — the bones are instantly recognizable. You’re dropped at the foot of the Spire, resurrected by Neow, that whale-like spirit of rebirth, handed a starter deck, and sent climbing a branching map where every node is a choice about how to sharpen your build toward one clean win condition. If you’ve done this dance before, your hands already know the steps.
What actually changed
Here’s the thing that surprised me: for a game that changes so little on paper, it feels remarkably fresh. Part of that is presentation. Returning artist Marlowe Dobbe kept the series’ distinctive look but cleaned up the legibility and poured in flowing new animations, and composer Clark Aboud is back with another gorgeous score. It’s the difference between a band re-recording their hit and a band covering it with the confidence of knowing they already made it big.
But the bigger shift is that Slay the Spire 2 finally has a story. In the first game, lore lived in flavor text and cryptic community theory-crafting. Here, world-building takes center stage. You start to understand what the Spire actually is, why the Slayers keep throwing themselves at it, and why Neow keeps dragging them back from death to try again. The delivery mechanism is genuinely clever: the unlock system, now called Epochs, doubles as a lore engine. Every Epoch you earn isn’t just a coolness-flavored progression tier — it’s a packet of history about the Spire’s past, bundled with actual new content. New neutral cards, new relics, entirely new boon-givers and biomes all shake loose just by playing. There’s a startling amount of new stuff to fold into your runs, and it kept pulling me back for “one more” far past when I should’ve stopped.
The characters, sharpened not swapped
There are five characters this time, two of them new, and the way Mega Crit handled the returning trio tells you a lot about their philosophy. The Ironclad, Silent, and Defect are refined rather than remixed. Their core archetypes and playstyles are largely intact, but they read more clearly at a glance now — more obvious, and therefore more efficient to build around.
Take the Defect, which remains a masterclass in synergy. It has a suite of low-power attacks you can fire off without spending energy, some of which pull already-played cards back from your discard pile. Time it right and you can chain free attacks, replay the perfect card at the perfect moment, and do it all over again. That “aha” moment when a deck suddenly clicks into a self-sustaining engine — that’s the beating heart of Slay the Spire, and the sequel is enormously generous with it. Discovering how far you can push each character and their decks is where I’ve had the most fun by a mile.
And yes, before you ask: co-op is here, up to four players, and it’s a blast. Climbing the Spire alongside friends changes the texture of a run completely.
The early-access asterisk
I’d be doing you a disservice not to flag the obvious: this is an early-access release, and that cuts both ways. The good news is it barely feels like one — the polish on display shames plenty of “finished” games, and I didn’t hit a single technical hiccup across all my time with it. Mega Crit clearly treated the weight of expectation with the seriousness it deserved.
The honest caveat is that things will change. Balance is still settling; some cards are too strong, some encounters need tuning, and Act 3’s bosses in particular are designed to hard-counter specific playstyles, echoing the way the Heart loomed over the first game. It’s less punishing than that — I never felt a run was truly hopeless from a bad matchup — but I’ve had to abandon strategies and improvise in some genuinely grueling spots. There’s a strange melancholy to reviewing a game mid-development, too: anything patched out over the next year is a color that won’t be in my palette come 1.0. But even in its current “messy” state, this is head and shoulders above nearly everything else in the genre.
So, should you climb?
If you want a perfectly balanced, fully finished, every-card-tuned experience, the sensible move is to wait a year or two for the 1.0 release. Nobody would fault you for it. But if you loved the original and simply want more of that specific magic — more characters, more synergies, more lore, more reasons to say “just one more run” at 2 a.m. — there’s no reason to hold off. And if you’re a total newcomer, honestly, grabbing the bundle with both games is a fantastic entry point into one of the best-designed genres in gaming.
Mega Crit set themselves an almost impossible task: follow up a game widely considered one of the best-designed ever made, without breaking what made it work. Somehow, they’ve managed to polish a near-perfect thing and make it shine brighter. I can’t wait to see what’s waiting at the top of the Spire this time — I’ll be climbing for a long while yet.
Slay the Spire 2 is available now in Early Access on Steam (PC), with a full 1.0 release expected in 2027.
