Slay the Spire 2 is cooking a "competitive" mode, but I'm most excited about its new short-time format

I’m in love with Slay the Spire 2, and millions of players are in the same boat. Like its predecessor, I suspect it’ll be a game I could theoretically pour thousands of hours into and still have fun, especially as more characters and modes are introduced throughout Early Access. But individual runs can be long, and as I struggle to find a spot to squeeze StS 2 into my daily schedule, I’m excited to hear Mega Crit co-founder Casey Yano teasing a less time-demanding mode among three possible new additions to the roguelike deckbuilder.

Slay the Spire 2 already offers daily challenges and the ability to set up your own modifiers for a custom run, along with the hugely successful co-op multiplayer mode, but they’re all pretty direct variants on the standard way to play. What else could we see as the game evolves? Speaking to PC Gamer, Yano says, “There are three specific things that I have in mind, which I’ll try to explain in a very vague way to not give away too much.

“The first one is a mode that is meant for people who want to play in a very competitive fashion. The second one is for people who want to have the Slay the Spire experience but don’t have the time to do so. The third one is, ‘What if there were other ways to interact with people socially, or in a multiplayer kind of setting, with the current systems that exist today?’ Those to me are the three different types of ways to interact with Slay the Spire that don’t exist right now.”

Yano is quick to stress that these aren’t set in stone: “Maybe having those modes dilutes the core experience and they might not make it at all, but it’s something that we just need to try to find out.” He explains, “We never make it, ‘100%, this has to be done.’ A game designer can be like, ‘I am making this thing and if you like it, you like it, and if you don’t like it, you don’t like it.’ But after a certain point we want to make sure that everything people interact with in the game is something that would be fun for you.”

He’s careful about stacking options too high; part of the beauty of the original Slay the Spire after all these years is its relative simplicity. “I despise the idea of having 23 worthless buttons on the screen,” Yano continues, “That’s a big no-no for me.” In a similar fashion, he’s cautious about the number of Slay the Spire 2 Ascension levels Mega Crit adds. While its current ten tiers are only half that of the first game, there’s no guarantee we’ll reach that number again.

“I can’t say today if we’re going to have more Ascensions or not. I personally felt that the climb to 20 per character was a little bit higher than we wanted for the first game, but we wanted to see the limits that people can tolerate difficulty – and it’s quite difficult.” He’s also very wary of how long reaching that level might take, especially as new characters are added to the roster.

“Because we have more characters [in Slay the Spire 2], we don’t want to have 20 Ascensions. Let’s say we end up with ten characters. Ten characters with ten Ascensions is 100 Ascensions, right?” Yano compares it to the four characters and 20 Ascensions of the first game, essentially totaling 80 successful runs. “We don’t really want the game to be way longer than the first, but we want there to be reasons to play, so there’s a minimum [time], but there’s also a maximum,” he concludes.

“I don’t really believe in the idea of making a game that kind of forces you to play forever,” Yano remarks, before pausing to clarify. “When I say ‘forces,’ I mean that there are so many motivators in the game for you to unlock that it’s this bizarre, infinitely hard thing to get 100% on. I want people to generally reach 100% relatively early compared to most games where you just kind of grind it out forever.”

For a game that’s capable of eating so much of my time, it’s refreshing to hear that Yano and Mega Crit are being considerate of that potential factor. “I would hope that people get 100% in less than 100 hours, even for a game we worked on for five years. I think that you as a human being that plays video games should be like, ‘What joy am I getting out of this game? What can I play that is not chasing achievements or filling out numbers to reach 100%?”