In the works for a few years now Slay the Spire mod-turned-fan-expansion Downfall is finally out—it even has one of those fancy full-on Steam pages like a proper game, but for a mod. I do love those.
Card game Slay the Spire is one of the absolute best games to come out in the past decade, an elegantly designed (our words) deckbuilder and roguelike that fuses the best of the genre’s tabletop origins with the kind of surprise you can only get in a digital format.
And Downfall deserves it, a massive loving tribute to the base game that adds a nicely-balanced new character: The Hermit, whose clever gimmick is that the position of some of their cards in their hand matters. A card in the exact center is Dead On, so it gains a bonus effect.
But Downfall’s real attraction is the titular game mode. In a Downfall run, you instead play as one of Seven villian characters and fight your way down the spire, encountering the heroes from the base game as you go. That’s right, you can finally take control of the slime boss and its little dapper hat. The downfal villains are a bit more complex than base characters, so it’s a pretty fun way to jump back into the game if you’re a lapsed player.
You can find Downfall: A Slay the Spire Fan Expansion on Steam.