"It's incredibly humbling and awesome that we're number one," says Anthony Giovannetti, co-founder of Slay the Spire 2 developer Mega Crit Games. That's right, folks: Slay the Spire 2 is The Council's Most Wanted game, carefully chosen from the 100-strong long list. We went to Seattle to get a peek behind the curtain and learn all we could about the upcoming deckbuilder.
It's been 1,000 years since the events of the first game, and the titular Spire has been dormant for all that time. But no longer. It's reopened, and a lot has changed.
"One of the big differences between Slay the Spire 1 and 2 is we have grown our team up so we can make a bigger game overall," Giovannetti says. "The art is way more polished, there's more animations, more visual effects, more characters, more events, more relics, more cards, returning characters have totally different card pools with the new cards as well ... everything is bigger than it was in Slay the Spire 1."
You can see just how flashy the effects look in the gameplay above. The aesthetic blends "grimdark with whimsy in it," art director Marlow Dobbe says.
"You're trying to make a serious fantasy world but have some fun with it and have some weirdness injected into it ... You'll meet these really horrifying monsters or Eldritch horrors and then you'll also do an event where there's a goblin there wearing a suit that wants to spin a wheel with you."
So, while the look will be familiar to returning players, there are changes that run deep. You can now apply enchantments to your cards, and "enemies can mess with your cards in ways they couldn't before," Giovannetti warns, so watch out.
There's even a quest system now, and a timeline mechanic that works alongside the game's lore. "It's gonna give the players way more information about the game world, the actors in it, just everything about it," teases Giovannetti.
As for the cards themselves, each character has a pool of around 60 to pull from, but they started with way more—100-200 per character. Giovannetti doesn't seem concerned with how much had to be cut, though.
"It's kind of like you're a butcher," he explains. "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."
Out of the ashes of the forest grow fresh saplings, like the new Necrobinder. "The Necrobinder is supposed to be a more complex character," explains co-founder Casey Yano. "She has a pet hand named Osty. Osty gets bigger and bigger the more HP it has, which is very funny, so I highly recommend making Osty huge."
As well as the Necrobinder, "There are a lot of bosses already, a lot of enemies, a lot of events—probably more than the first game just on early access launch," Yano continues.
Slay the Spire 2 will also be launching into early access in March, and you can wishlist it on Steam right now.
While Yano is clearly proud of what the team has achieved, he's also a little baffled by The Council's vote of confidence in the game.
"Voted number one is an honour and a surprise," he says. "I feel like Slay the Spire is the chicken noodle soup of videogames. It's not exciting, but I hope people like our soup."
Well, I like chicken noodle soup Yano, and it seems The Council does, too. Now, check out everything announced during the PC Gaming Show: Most Wanted Powered by Xbox Game Pass.
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