Slay the Spire 2‘s multiplayer component is a lovely, sociable game of tactical chemistry and unity in the face of hideous door-based lifeforms, but inevitably, the modders are trying to ruin the bonhomie by adding PvP.
Created by Maimun, SlayThePlayer is a Slay the Spire 2 mod that spices up co-op runs by swapping the act bosses for versus battles. “Two players start a co-op run on the same seed, navigate their own independent maps, and fight each other at every act boss,” explains the description. “Best of 3 acts wins.” It comes with specially commissioned art for a Versus button, which takes you to a co-op lobby where you and another player can choose a map seed. When you start the game, each player breaks off into a singleplayer roguelite run, with the online connection reduced to a “thin messaging layer”.
This part functions pretty much as in regular Spire 2, but you’ll get a couple of special starting relics. The Fate Thread relic is a safety net to ensure you don’t cop it before reaching the PvP portion and therefore, waste the other player’s time. If you perish in regular combat, it revives you at 20%, ends the fight with no rewards, and adds a Clumsy curse card to your deck as punishment.
The Grin & Grave, meanwhile, is a one-time revive specifically for when you’re killed in PvP. It revives you with 1 HP, before graying out. As such, the PvP run ends when one player achieves two victories, though the winner has the option of carrying on as in a normal Spire 2 run.
The really clever bit, as the mod’s author unabashedly proclaims, is how the mod adjusts the game’s turn-based combat to work in PvP multiplayer. The turn order is randomly determined at the outset, and only the active player can play cards or interact with things. When you deal damage, it’s not applied immediately, but queued in the form of an intention icon visible to both players. The other player then has a full turn to react, whether blocking or going on the offensive, before the queued damage is resolved.
The damage intent display itself shows both individual hits and the total damage output, with numbers recalculated in real-time as debuffs are applied. Player HP is also scaled per act to account for your deck getting beefier. There’s a lot more to it than that, but these are the broad strokes – check out the NexusMod page for a full breakdown and installation instructions.
Mega Crit’s latest deckbuilder continues to be popular in early access despite a mildly controversial Slay the Spire 2 patch that clamped down on the possibility of infinite card combos. Mega Crit have sought to defuse the Steam review bombers by promising that “no change is necessarily permanent”.
