Jul 12, 2018
Slay the Spire - Valve
Save 37% on Slay the Spire as part of this week's Weekend Deal*!
*Offer ends Monday at 10AM Pacific Time
*Offer ends Monday at 10AM Pacific Time
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We’ve just passed the half-way point of 2018, so Ian Gatekeeper and all his fabulously wealthy chums over at Valve have revealed which hundred games have sold best on Steam over the past six months. It’s a list dominated by pre-2018 names, to be frank, a great many of which you’ll be expected, but there are a few surprises in there.
2018 releases Jurassic World Evolution, Far Cry 5 Kingdom Come: Deliverance and Warhammer: Vermintide II are wearing some spectacular money-hats, for example, while the relatively lesser-known likes of Raft, Eco and Deep Rock Galactic have made themselves heard above the din of triple-A marketing budgets. (more…)
Last week, Slay the Spire added a third game mode and cracked one million copies sold. This week, the roguelike deck-builder adds a new Face Trader feature, five new Shop Relics and Relic Overflow Paging—the latter of which improves how multiple Relics are displayed at once. It now packs up to 25 relics per page. Which, in the heat of a game, is a lot of Relics.
Let's start with that. Developer Mega Crit says Relics were difficult to identify when "people were having fun testing the game's limits". As such, in order to maintain a "reasonable" hitbox, Relics no longer shrink as more are added to your deck. Instead, players can now page through relics, and reduced spacing means 25 reclics can now fit into a single page. That looks like this:
The new Face Trader event is described by the dev like so: "It's a new event. This event shows up in any Act and can give you one of five relics exclusive to this event, we think it's facetastic."
With that, expect the new Cultist Headpiece, Face of the Cleric, Gremlin Visage, N'loth's Hungry Face, and Ssserpent Head. New Shop Relics include the Clockwork Souvenir, Dolly's Mirror, Meal Ticket, The Abacus and the Twisted Funnel. Moreover, the third relic sold by the merchant is now always a shop rarity.
Full patch notes on all of that can be found here. If you're struggling with Slay the Spire, let me suggest our tips for topping the tower.
Nearly every night, I do the ‘should I play more Slay The Spire‘ dance. The cons: I wind up feeling guilty about not spending my free time trying something new, such as any of the half-dozen games I bought in the Steam Sale. The pros: it’s always satisfying, and there’s nearly always something that makes each run uniquely interesting.
That’s largely thanks to the devs adding something new to their roguelike deckbuilder nearly every Friday. Today’s early access update is a little beefier than usual, chucking in ten new relics and a special event where a six-armed entity offers you a new face. (more…)
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.
Excellent deck-building roguelike Slay the Spire has now sold one million copies, developer Mega Crit Games said this week as it unveiled a new game mode that allows you to craft custom dungeon runs.
Custom mode, Slay the Spire's third game mode, offers a variety of modifiers to switch on and off that will drastically change your next run. You can jump into the custom dungeon yourself, or share your options with others for them to try.
The 15 or so modifiers can both make the runs easier or harder. For example, one will let you pick your own custom deck before the run starts, while another changes the map so it only contains one path, cutting down your options. Some will add specific cards to your deck to alter your play style. Switch on all the difficult ones and you'll create a near-impossible challenge.
To unlock the mode, you'll first have to complete one of the difficult daily challenges, which will earn you the "My Lucky Day" achievement.
"Our aim is to expand this mode to allow new challenges such as Endless mode (which is still being worked on in Beta) and eventually allow players to create, incorporate, and access mods through this flexible interface," the developer said in a Steam post. See a quick gif of that interface below.
Thanks, PCGamesN.
