What Works And Why is a monthly column where Gunpoint and Heat Signature designer Tom Francis digs into the design of a game or mechanic and analyses what makes it good.>

When games offer you abilities and perks that boost your stats, they often do it in a meager, fiddly way:

5% chance to deal 10% extra damage for 5 seconds. Does not stack.>

This is dry, fussy and boring to me. A 5% chance is so low I can never bank on it happening, 10% extra damage is so small I won’t notice it, and lasting 5 seconds means there’s this extra state I now need to know about and track. And ‘does not stack’ might be the saddest phrase in game design.

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Delightful deck-building dungeon-crawler Slay The Spire has officially launched its third character, a robot wizard named The Defect, and they’re a wild one. The Defect can conjure and consume a series of Orbs with passive and active effects, can pull off wild tricks with huge numbers of Power cards, and can also go full-on murderbot and tear enemies apart with their bare hands. I had thought The Defect was underpowered when they first arrived in the public beta build last month but, after more time with ’em, they might be my favourite spire-slayer. (more…)

Deck-building dungeon-crawler Slay The Spire has become even more delightful with today’s early access update, which added loads more potions. Before, potions were bland, not requiring much thought or planning, and largely skippable. Now you’ll find potions giving ghostly intangibility, fleeting bursts of strength, discard decisions, free cards, and other effects worth considering.

To see so very, very many of the new potions and try ’em up, do check out today’s daily run; its starting deck includes 15 copies of the potion-brewing Alchemize. (more…)

Welcome to Spawn Point, where we take something wonderful from the world of gaming and explain what it is, why it s worth your time and how to get involved. This time: collectible card games (or at least, the videogame kind).>

Hello, I would like to collect some cards please. Of course, friend. We have a wide variety of fantasy themed cards, ranging from hostile dragon to raving ghoul to

Hang on, what are these numbers? Oh, ignore those, they re nothing to worry about. Look at this wizard! (more…)

The third Slay The Spire character is a robot wizard who manipulates orbs, named The Defect, and you can check it out today. The Defect has arrived in the latest beta build for the early access deck-building roguelikelike, and though they’re not quite finished ooh they are an interesting one. The Defect is the trickiest character so far, focused on building, managing, and exhausting a queue of different passive and active effects in the orbs – with actual attack cards almost a secondary concern. I’ve pulled off clutch wins with orbs and suffered dismal defeats, and I’m keen to learn more. (more…)

It’s not news that Slay The Spire is great–we’ve written about that oh so very much–but you might have missed how great its ‘Daily Climb’ daily run mode has become. On the deck-building roguelikelike’s journey through early access, developers Mega Crit Games have kept adding daily modifiers that change the game in strange ways, and it’s become my favourite way to play. I’m not even in it for competing on the leaderboards, I just like these strange variants – especially after Friday’s patch added a Draft modifier that makes spire-climbers build their own starting deck. (more…)

Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day, perhaps for all time.>

Still very much a going concern around these parts, but screw it, I’ve not yet written about Slay The Spire, a game that has consumed most of my waking thoughts these past couple of months, so here we go. (more…)

Slay the Spire is brill, if you haven’t heard, and with each early access update it only gets briller. The most recent one spruced up the daily challenge mode, making it even harder for me to resist playing it every day until the third character comes out. Before the daily modifiers mainly just made your life miserable – introducing tougher enemies, lowering your health and so on – but they now tend to come with benefits as well as drawbacks.

Alec has already sung the praises of the mode’s earlier form, and now I get to do the same with this better version.

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This is Brendan, broadcasting live from rumour world, where everything is made of a nebulous candy floss-like substance. The locals call it hope. Amid this sticky cloud, a figure has formed. It s Geralt of Rivia, hero of popular Gwent spin-off, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. The monster-hunting swordsman will make an appearance in another game later this year, according to CD Projekt Red community lead Marcin Momot. Some have asserted that he’ll be a guest character in upcoming fighting game Soul Calibur VI. Which makes sense given the close business ties between the Polish studio and Japanese publisher Namco Bandai.

It isn’t confirmed. But it does raise the question: who else deserves a place on the stage of history? I asked the RPS treehouse who they d like to see. Here s the list we all settled on. (more…)

Casually fulfilling its destiny to become the videogame that consumes the rest of my life, ultro-superb CCG/roguelike combo Slay The Spire just introduced its third mode, the Daily Climb. It’s about the most logical move Spire could have made, adding a daily challenge mode of the type popularised by Spelunky and The Binding Of Isaac (even big ol’XCOM 2 was inspired to do it, though the sadly the take-up hasn’t been great).

Just as my Spire obsession was starting to waver – I’ve unlocked everything, and the difficulty gonkery for the sake of difficulty gonkery of Ascension mode isn’t quite for me – this solid gold reason to play every day turns up.

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