Slay the Spire will leave Early Access on January 23, developer Mega Crit Games announced in a weekly update. Trading cards, Steam Workshop support are on their way, along with a price hike after the Winter Sale. 

It’s a roguelike adventure up a magical—and extremely dangerous—tower, with cards representing your character’s combat and adventuring skills. Each character has a unique set of cards, and you can pick from more than 200 while trying to create your deck. You get these cards from killing enemies, mostly, forcing you to improvise instead of creating a deck at the start. 

These cards define your character, so you’re essentially building a class as you ascend the tower, with cards standing in for the gear and magic an adventurer might find in a conventional roguelike dungeon delve. And then you die, a new tower is generated and you can start building a new character with a new deck.

It’s a novel system and Slay the Spire has had a pretty successful Early Access, garnering quite a bit of praise. Check out our Slay the Spire preview from last January, and keep an eye out for our review next year.

Today's update is a small one that fixes some bugs and adds a bit of polish. Read the full patch notes here.

Slay the Spire has been a shining example of Steam Early Access done right. It was a clever, polished roguelike deck builder when it launched a year ago, and has only gotten better since, with new cards and characters and art and consistent weekly patches. Now, according to the latest update, the final content for Early Access is coming to the game next week.

Technically, that final content is in the game already—if you're playing on the beta branch. It's been in testing for a couple weeks now, and should go live in the main branch of the game in patch 50. Mindful of spoilers for a build-up a year in the making, Slay the Spire's developers and its community have avoided talking openly about what that final content entails. The gist is that it's Act 4 of Slay the Spire, which goes beyond the cliffhanger of current successful runs to provide a final boss and a real ending.

Given Slay the Spire's popularity, I think it's safe to say this won't be the final content for the game, period—new characters, cards, and balance patches down the road seem likely. But this update will round out the game's campaign for its release out of Early Access.

As a bonus, the developers have been incorporating unlockable "beta" card art created by the community that you can use after you've beaten the game. This started with the placeholder art Mega Crit Games used during development, before the artists came in and drew the real thing. But the devs didn't make placeholder art for every card, so the community's stepped up with some wonderfully bad MS Paint concoctions to fill out each deck. Here's one that's actually in the game:

And here are a bunch of submission from the Slay the Spire subreddit. I'd definitely play with these enabled, even though the new card art is consistently beautiful.