Slay the Spire 2 dev celebrates its instant success by reminding players to support 'small indie passion projects' like Marathon too

Slay the Spire 2 artwork
(Image credit: Mega Crit)

After being delayed in late 2025, Slay the Spire 2 entered early access on March 5 and was instantly a mega-hit. It shot past the two most recent big-hitters, Marathon and Resident Evil: Requiem, and remains firmly entrenched at the top of Steam's best-sellers.

That's perhaps not surprising for the sequel to one of the best deck-builders ever made (and the winner of PC Gamer's Best Design award in 2019). Right now an incredible 224,000 players are slaying that spire, and there are just under 6,000 reviews on Steam that average out to an "overwhelmingly positive" rating It's a hit! But developer Mega Crit wants to remind players that it's not the be-all and end-all.

There's also a little heart emoji at the end. The account also clarified to one player celebrating the "shade" that "it wasn’t supposed to be shade, we were being sarcastic." It's a joke folks, OK: not everything needs to be a gigantic fight, and so far Marathon is doing quite well in its own right. The reason for the tweet name-checking Marathon is most likely to be that the two games released at exactly the same time.

Marathon tag marked locations: A close-up, high-angle shot of Gantry, MIDA's liaison.

(Image credit: Bungie)

"It's kind of like you're a butcher," Giovannetti said. "You generate thousands, tens of thousands of different ideas and then you look at them all and you go, 'these are bad,' and you just cut them all away. There's this constant culling process. Very rarely is there this golden idea you keep from start to finish. Most of it is this incredibly destructive process."

Mega Crit says the plan is to keep Slay the Spire 2 in early access for one or two years "until the game feels great," and add "cards, events, environments, enemies, and more" along the way. Elsewhere, the folks behind the Godot engine are celebrating Slay the Spire 2's release, and reckon it has a chance of being "the biggest Godot game release to date."

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Rich Stanton
Senior Editor

Rich is a games journalist with 15 years' experience, beginning his career on Edge magazine before working for a wide range of outlets, including Ars Technica, Eurogamer, GamesRadar+, Gamespot, the Guardian, IGN, the New Statesman, Polygon, and Vice. He was the editor of Kotaku UK, the UK arm of Kotaku, for three years before joining PC Gamer. He is the author of a Brief History of Video Games, a full history of the medium, which the Midwest Book Review described as "[a] must-read for serious minded game historians and curious video game connoisseurs alike."

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