May 14, 2026
I really like the game Slay the Spire. Between Steam and mobile platforms, I guess I have sunk some 600-800 hours into the first game, and I’m already up to 200 in the sequel, which came out at the start of March.
That’s nowhere near the playtime of the top players. The game has a large audience of casual strategy gamers who enjoy assembling overpowered combos, as well as a niche of hardcore players who enjoy min-maxing and thinking through every move as thoroughly as possible. For them, the challenge is core to the reward of playing the game. Therefore, it’s important that it remain genuinely challenging — and at least in the first game, that challenge was stimulating enough to entice some to keep at it for many thousands of hours.
I’m far from the best player, but I’m pretty good. I defeated the Heart on Ascension 20 at least 40 times in the first game, something only about 5% of players have done once; and earned every achievement, which is even rarer. I was able to apply my game knowledge to the sequel and raced to Ascension 10, the currently highest difficulty level, with a winrate around 90%.
There are levels to this game, though. While I’m probably among the top 5% of players, the very best players have more consecutive wins with each Slay the Spire character than I have wins on those characters in total. And while I don’t intend to put in the 10,000 hours of playtime that some of those players have done to reach that level, I do want to get better.
Part of that project has been to record and upload all of my runs on YouTube. It’s not so that I can review and assess what I could have done differently — though that’s part of it — but primarily so that I force myself not to save-scum.
Save-scumming is the practice of saving and leaving a game of Slay the Spire in the middle of a fight, then resuming the game. This puts you back at the start of the fight — and because the order of cards in your deck, enemy actions, and various other things are predetermined by the seed, it’s easy to predict what will happen and hone your strategy if needed.
This can help you avoid death or, when used liberally, help you optimize every fight in order to make you stronger throughout the whole run. It’s very powerful and makes the game much easier.
To some, it is just a part of the game. After all, if the developers didn’t want players to do it, why would they leave it in? But most players, including me, agree that save-scumming disqualifies runs from being included in world record streaks and the like. They don’t really count. And for players who enjoy the challenge, save-scumming is self-defeating.
Certainly, it’s a great way to avoid getting better at the game. It serves as a crutch that prevents players from actually getting better, because it gives them more room to play poorly and get away with it. I don’t remember when I started save-scumming, but recently I felt I had gotten too comfortable with it and decided I wanted to stop. I figured having a mechanism to enforce it would be helpful.
So now I am uploading my runs on YouTube. There’s not a lot of effort that goes into them. I press record and play; and if I win, I cut, render, and upload. So far, I have uploaded 6 wins (out of 18 games). This is about half of my winrate prior to committing myself to never save-scum, which is a bigger drop than I expected and shows that even doing it sparsely can have a major impact on the challenge.
Still, winning 1 in every 3 games at the top difficulty is not bad and I already feel like I’m a better player. But when players like Xecnar believe every run is winnable, it feels far from what it could be. Could I get to winning 1 in every 2, to start? I plan to try.