Slay the Spire 2, a sequel to the hit 2019 video game, is planned for release next year via Steam Early Access.
Its developer, the Seattle-based studio Mega Crit, made the announcement during Wednesday’s Triple-i Initiative Showcase, a livestreamed event that highlighted multiple new and upcoming indie video game projects.
The original Slay the Spire has quietly become one of the most influential computer games of the last decade. It’s a clever fusion between collectible deck-building card games and a “roguelike” dungeon crawler, where players explore a randomized dungeon in a dark fantasy world.
Each battle is conducted by playing cards, and victory rewards you with more cards and relics. The challenge is to slap together a winning strategy on the fly from whatever you can find before the game’s dangers grind you down.
Slay the Spire first came out for PCs in 2017, and spent two years in Early Access on Steam before its full release in January 2019. Despite a slow initial start, it sold more than 1.5 million copies by the following March, according to co-creator Casey Yano, and has since been ported to mobile devices and every major console.
Yano is an ex-Amazon employee, while his co-founder at Mega Crit, Anthony Giovannetti, worked at Cequint and the now-defunct Ernie’s Games in Woodinville, Wash. Both are graduates from the University of Washington-Bothell who left their jobs in 2015 to begin work on the project that became Slay the Spire.
Since Slay the Spire’s release, CCG-based games like it have become one of the most consistently popular sub-genres in the indie-game scene, with other releases like Deck of Ashes, Monster Train, Griftlands, Throne of Bone, Rogue Lords, and Richard Garfield’s Roguebook following in its path. With a sequel, Mega Crit has a solid chance of continuing to push the envelope on a sub-genre that it more or less helped to define.
No further details about Slay the Spire 2 have been announced at time of writing, but Mega Crit promises that more is to come over the course of the year.
Other Pacific Northwest game news from the the Triple-i Initiative Showcase included:
- Red Hook Games’ Darkest Dungeon 2, which left Steam Early Access last May, will get a free content update later this year. This adds a new standalone campaign mode, Kingdoms, where players fight several new factions in defense of their turf.
- Vancouver, B.C.,-based Thorium Entertainment released its debut title, UnderMine, via Fandom in 2019 before moving into self-publishing. The sequel, UnderMine 2, adds 2-player co-op to its dungeon-delving roguelike formula.
- Bellevue, Wash.-based indie publisher tinyBuild released a new trailer for Streets of Rogue 2, a tongue-in-cheek open-world game about overthrowing a corrupt mayor.
- tinyBuild also promoted Broken Roads, an RPG set in post-apocalyptic Australia, which released today for PC, Xbox, and PlayStation platforms.
