Slay the Spire's final act is coming next week, along with charmingly bad community card art

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.

Wes has been covering games and hardware for more than 10 years, first at tech sites like The Wirecutter and Tested before joining the PC Gamer team in 2014. Wes plays a little bit of everything, but he'll always jump at the chance to cover emulation and Japanese games.

When he's not obsessively optimizing and re-optimizing a tangle of conveyor belts in Satisfactory (it's really becoming a problem), he's probably playing a 20-year-old Final Fantasy or some opaque ASCII roguelike. With a focus on writing and editing features, he seeks out personal stories and in-depth histories from the corners of PC gaming and its niche communities. 50% pizza by volume (deep dish, to be specific).