The trailer for Slay the Spire 2’s early access release dropped 11 days ago and it got me thinking deeply. Let me share a graph with you.
This is the number of games released on Steam with the tag ‘Roguelike Deckbuilder’ by year. When I started the Roguelike Deck-Building Games – A Chronological Exploration project, my original intention was that I’d probably play one game over one week and have a blog post covering it the week after, and continue alternating in that way. As 2023 went on, I realised that the rate of games released in this subgenre would handily outpace that – but in a pre-Balatro world, I couldn’t even begin to guess by just how much. Regardless, this is just the stuff I can track by Steam release. If I don’t factor in things that only have, say, an itch.io release, or a mobile-only release in a foreign country which may no longer be playable, could I even be said to be properly keeping track of everything chronologically?
Back when I finally got to Slay the Spire’s ‘turn’ in the blog, it occurred to me that a time would soon come when the majority of the games I would be playing would begin and end with StS as the entirety of what they wanted their game to be. The more celebrated games in this space build on what StS and its progenitors did as a backbone for a wider variety of mechanics or ideas from unrelated genres entirely (Dicey Dungeons, Inscryption, and Cobalt Core leap to mind… a further dozen names are getting their shoes on). Would there still be a purpose (never mind any interest) for an in-order chronology when the primary influence would be increasingly apparent for the majority of entries? I’m no longer certain. I’m extremely excited for StS2, but if I thought covering all of these games was hard to manage in the wake of the success of the first game, it will likely become impossible when a new glut on a scale hitherto unseen follows the sequel.
Rather than even try and fail to keep up, here’s how I’m moving the goalposts:
1. The articles I wrote about games released before Slay the Spire came out will stay up, but I’m retroactively changing their tag to ‘Before the Spire’. I still plan to reach out to the devs for interviews for the remaining 8 or so games, and maybe beyond.
2. The articles I wrote about games after Slay the Spire came out will also stay up, and I’ll tag those ‘Beyond the Spire’. If you turn them while reheating, they’re still perfectly good posts. And who knows, perhaps this way, I’ll get to talk about Monster Train within my lifetime.
I’ve gotten a (slightly) better handle of myself over the last several years and, arbitrary as it may seem, it’s important for me, mentally, to draw a line under the chronological format and move on, lest the feeling of being overwhelmed stop me from ever putting a dent in the topic again – especially when I think it’s something that can no longer be caught up on for one person with a fulltime job that isn’t… doing this! I apologise to anyone who was interested in seeing this unfold further chronologically, but I’m choosing to see this optimistically as a worthwhile experiment while it lasted. Without ‘having to do the next game’, I’m now better able to post about the standouts and obscurities in this no-longer-so-little niche I love. Most importantly, I can play StS2 the moment it drops on Friday morning until my eyes completely dry out and turn to dust… guiltfree!
Shrunken Shrine 