Someone recently told me that reading one of my blog posts led them to play Celeste1. So in that spirit, here’s another post about pastimes. This time, it’s on Slay the Spire2.
I don’t think anyone has ever genuinely enjoyed3 being ill and stuck in bed with a bug.. Your phone feels simultaneously like the only option and the worst possible thing. And yet between the fever and the boredom, I started playing this roguelike card game, and the experience of doing nothing became, unexpectedly, rather enjoyable.
For the uninitiated, Slay the Spire is a card based roguelike where you climb a procedurally generated dungeon, fight increasingly unhinged enemies, and build a deck along the way. Every run is different and often also ends in death, usually at the hands of something that felt completely manageable until it wasn’t. In this way it has a lot in common with Celeste, except in Celeste the thing killing you is a mountain and in Slay the Spire it’s sometimes your own ability (or lack thereof) of doing basic arithmetic4.
I find the joy in the combinations. Finding a card synergy that clicks where two or three cards interact in a way that makes you feel briefly like a genius is genuinely one of the more satisfying feelings a game can produce. The feeling of invincibility, right before the game decides you’ve been having too much fun and sends something that ignores your entire strategy5. The frustrating runs are equally instructive. There’s a kind of rage that comes from a deck that almost works and where you can see exactly what you needed but simply didn’t get it; a single card away from a combination that would have been beautiful but instead: Ironclad dead on floor 37.
What surprised me was how meditative the whole process of gaming is. And I don’t mean this in the sitting still, focusing on breath, achieving some kind of serene mental stillness way. For a long time I dismissed that thought because my brain doesn’t do serene mental stillness on demand. But I’ve come to think meditation is really just the act of focus. Directing your attention completely toward one thing, and staying there. It doesn’t have to be peaceful or even pleasant. Slay the Spire is occasionally infuriating and yet the infuriation is focused. The frustration has an object; your mind is fully occupied which is its own kind of rest from everything it was worrying about before.
If this has convinced you to try Slay the Spire, you’re most welcome.6
- You can find that post here: ‘I don’t know, it’s a mystery‘ ↩︎
- Both 1 and 2 ↩︎
- Turns out staring at the ceiling stops being interesting after about 42 minutes ↩︎
- Being an aspiring mathematician by no means guarantees full accuracy in performing addition of 2-digit numbers ↩︎
- In my humble experience this game is not interested in you feeling like a genius for long. ↩︎
- I accept no responsibility for hours well spent chasing enemies up an increasingly hostile tower. ↩︎
