Slay the Spire by Mega Crit is the best deck building rogue-like ever made. By a wide margin even.
In the game, you take control of one of 4 characters — Ironclad, Silent, Defect or Watcher — and climb the spire full of enemies to combat and random events to encounter. You start with a starter deck of hits and blocks and effects and slowly build your deck from combat rewards, events and shops. Your goal is to build a deck that can beat even the strongest monsters who inhabit the spire.
While each run starts with the same deck, you can’t rely on a single strategy every time. This keeps the game so replayable and always a joy to return to. The game’s main loop is built around finding the right synergies (as Game Maker’s Toolkit so eloquently explains) so that the deck becomes more than the sum of its individual cards. That’s the only way to win as the monsters scale much faster than individual cards on each run.
A basic card is a simple card: here a Strike costs 1 energy and deals 6 damage to one enemy monster. It’s enough to get through the small critters in the beginning. As the difficulty raises and monsters hit harder, you need to develop better strategies.
One of my favourite strategies revolve around the Shiv card with character Silent. Shiv is a 0-energy (ie. free to play) attack card that deals 4 damage. On its own, not a very strong card. But combined with cards like Accuracy that adds 4 to their damage output, Blade Dance that draws you 3 of them and with relics like Dead Branch — that replaces every Exhausted card with a new random card — or Shuriken — that gives you one Strength (+1 to every attack) for every 3 attacks you play in a single turn — and suddenly you can play half a dozen free Shivs that deal massive damage, pump up your future damage and draw new cards.
Each of the four characters have their unique cards and strategies and after you finish a run successfully, you unlock a harder difficulty. These difficulties go up to 20 levels and personally after about 400 hours of play, I’m not even close to the top. I mainly enjoy playing with Silent or Defect.
The game also has an active modding community (at least on Steam/PC, don’t know if there are any on consoles) and there’s a lot of new characters, quality of life mods and other new things to spice up the game if you run out of enjoyment from the base game.
The much awaited sequel Slay the Spire 2 is coming to Steam’s Early Access around March 2026 and I’m half excited half nervous about it. I want more of Slay the Spire but given how good the first one was, it’s gonna be a hard task to improve it.