This is an ideal scenario for piracy I feel. I pirated it at first, unsure if it would be for me. Now I own it on both Switch and Steam :).

Most certainly! I’ve been playing this game for ages so I 'm unsure what advice is beginner friendly and what not, but let’s see…

1. Indeed, use any opportunity to throw away one of your starting Strikes (and to a lesser extent, the Defends). Strikes are by far the worst non-curse cards, dealing only 6 damage for 1 cost and taking up a slot in your five card draw each turn. You’ll obtain way better cards and want to increase the chance of drawing those, which is why you really want to remove bad cards as frequently as possible. (At shops and events).
2. Do not avoid elites! These are the special looking enemies on the map and they are the only fights who drop Relics. Having good Relics and building your deck around them is essential to winning this game!
3. Don’t pick a card at the end of every fight, only pick the cards that you really want. A small but predictable deck is way better than a massive deck full of OK cards. Seriously, this is one of the most important things I learned, the skip button is there to be used.
4. Pick cards and relics that increase card draw. A big issue in Slay the Spire is drawing a bad hand and not having the necessary cards for that turn in hand. Lots of cards, relics and potions will allow you to draw extra cards during your turn, which can often make the difference between life and death in this game. Especially towards the end when you have more energy, it becomes extremely important to be able to spend it on good cards, and increasing the cards you draw per turn gives you more options to play good cards.
5. Finally, keep trying. Different enemy types attack in their own pattern every time. Even when you lose, you start to learn their mechanics and how to best counteract those. There are three elite types per act, and three end boss types per act. For the end bosses, you can actually see on the map which one you will have at the end of the current act! So in total, there are “only” 9 different bosses* and 9 different elites. Once you get to know them, you’ll realize their strengths and weaknesses!

There is a tenth secret boss at the true ending, but let’s not dwell on that for now :). Suffice it to say that the pro players have win streaks of 20+ on the highest ascension difficulty (ascension 20) while always taking on this extra final boss. So this game is insanely tactical and almost any run can be salvaged to win even on the highest difficulty!

Enjoy your journey :). Oh, and start with Ironclad, he’s the most straightforward character!

Did you ever give Slay the Spire a go? I was also quite sceptical about roguelikes, but now it is by far my most played game ever at a whopping 600 hours.

The beauty of it is that it is quite easy to understand, but with an incredible amount of depth to it. You’ll start out having trouble winning your first ever run, but that’s when the fun begins. There are 4 characters, each with their play style and cards, and there are 20 ascensions to unlock, each being a more difficult version of a standard run. In the end, you’ll gain such a deep understanding of the balancing and tradeoffs at play that you can’t not be amazed at this achievement in game design. Baalorlord is a great YouTuber and Twitch streamer who is also one of the best players in the world. He was able to do a consecutive winstreak of 20 wins on the highest ascension, showing that this game is RNG based but has a tremendous amount of skill involved too.

A nice article. I share the author’s dislike of Antifa techniques and behavior and also see it as not constructive. Counterproductive, but in no way terrorist. However, this designating of Antifa as a terrorist organization allows them to take any form of dissent and claim it is Antifa, in effect turning any form of protest into a crime. Nasty stuff, literal forced radicalization so that any form of opposition can be characterized as crazy, violent and dangerous for the rest of the population, which is almost never actually the case.

Telltale was severely mismanaged. They expanded way too quickly and created incredible amounts of debt based on the idea that all their games would be as successful as The Walking Dead. I do believe that there is a place for episodic adventure games, just with a small enough scope and expectations.

You can read it if you add archive.ph/ in front of the link (replace the www with it). It really is a well written article. I also don’t like paywalls, but I like good journalism and as they are still figuring out a way to earn money on the web I also understand their choice for these types of strategies.

There is a difference between telling and putting videos on the internet of you masturbating.

As someone who lives in Europe (Belgium), this sounds absolutely insane. If a prison were to do something like this here it would be all over the news! Simply disgusting.

In Belgium publishers are obligated to send a single copy to the national library, so in that case the only public funding that is wasted is the extra storage space, which would be rather minimal. I don’t know if Japan has similar rules, but I wouldn’t call it a “massive” waste compared to some other places where public money is spent.

I studied some courses on archival, so I am probably biased. I think preservation is important, and even in this case I would prefer for them to be archived too, as the box and box art are also part of the piece and of cultural significance.

This just makes me so incredibly sad. I don’t know how it is in other countries, but here in Belgium, and by extension some of Europe, the public is becoming more and more aligned with the Palestinians and even governments are starting to stir. It’s just so fucking sad that it has to take so many lost lives and homes before anything gets going…

They are just posting the article headline, direct your anger to the BBC and not this kind soul taking the time to share it.

This is a great question! A few from the top of my head:

The original Assassin’s Creed: I would never have the patience to play something like this on my PC. It is too repetitive and basic for me to enjoy while the rest of my PC is available. On Steam Deck though, I loved playing this in bed as a way to turn my mind off and just enjoy a simple story / game. I had a similar experience with the 2008 Prince Of Persia reboot. I 100% completed both, something I would never do on PC or TV console.

Undertale I also enjoyed way more during my second playthrough on Steam Deck. I think it has something to do with being fully immersed and again, playing from the comfort of my bed.

Also Slay The Spire, I got reasonably into it on a pirated copy on PC, then played it for hundreds of hours on the switch, then finally got a steam deck and it was the first game I bought for it, now sitting at 700h on Steam alone. So I went from piracy to actually owning the game twice :).

Any visual novel like Steins;Gate, Zero Escape series, Danganronpa… I would never be able to complete these games on PC or console.

What I notice, is that longer games mostly only work for me portably, because of the way you can sneak in extra hours on a portable machine. Time spent playing on TV or PC is always quite scheduled, and I often feel like I don’t want to waste it on a single experience for too long.

I find this so strange, because it is often the friction / mystery that compels me to keep playing. See Blue Prince, Sifu, Soulslikes, Outer Wilds…

I have a playthrough going on of Bravely Default on my 3DS, but I got stuck on a difficult fight and never finished it. I wonder if I should go back, but it’s been a while and I’m unsure if I remember the story.

While I do agree with a lot of the points made in the article, most of them seem rather basic stuff that everybody has been talking about since AI has started to rise. The tool isn’t necessarily the problem, it’s the capitalist incentives for which it is created and used that drive us further towards dystopia. I found it rather funny to read a former exec criticizing capitalism. I wonder what he’s up to now?

Also, both the year 2027 and the timespan of 15 years seem confidently pulled out of his backside :).

This is such a measured response, I love you for it!

This is quite an old video, and lately he’s been working on his communication issues. He fully admits that he’s been a dick many times. This all escalated a couple of years ago where he even took a few months off and focussed solely on getting this fixed and getting help I believe.

Not to say he’s perfect now, but I don’t think we’ll ever get this sort of catharsis from Elon, Trump, Bezos…

I am going to sound super mainstream, but the only album of 2025 that I have listened to multiple times is Hurry Up Tomorrow by The Weeknd. Not his best work, but still a great ride with some absolute bangers.

I mostly listen to older music or am late to the party with more recent stuff :).

Hey! This is a really fun topic, hope it’s OK for me to give the perspective of someone who (at the moment :P) identifies as a straight, cis man.

I joined beehaw because it felt like a super nice and safe space, not just for queer people, but for anyone looking for a kinder internet. I’ve always felt a strong connection though to queer people and we often get along really well. I think it has to do with the fact that, even though I still identify as a straight cis man, I don’t really fit into the stereotype well. I hate macho culture, I am often very passionate and emotional, don’t like “mens” talk etc. I also have some mental issues which make me “different”, and in that sense I feel like we share a similar feeling of “not fitting in”, be it for different reasons. Accepting yourself and others for who you really are seems like a central idea in a queer-friendly space, and this is stuff that can help anyone as everybody has something about them that is different or goes against the grain.

I do feel that I am more open to my own possible queerness. I still identify as a man and am attracted to women, but there are moments where I can really appreciate a beautiful man too. Where I would have brushed over something like that in previous years, now I quite like it when I notice it and enjoy the experience. Even though I haven’t yet actually felt physical attraction, I like that there is a part of me that is able to enjoy this too.

Tied with The Outer Wilds as my favorite game of all time.