Slay the Spire 2 devs wanted to keep updating the original instead of making a sequel, but then their publisher shut down: "I guess we were a little naive"

Slay the Spire 2 has been wildly successful so far – notwithstanding the piles of negative reviews that every balance change for the early access game seems to garner – but the developers at Mega Crit initially didn't want to make a sequel at all. Instead, they'd hoped to just keep updating the original with new features and tweaks, but that started to look pretty unrealistic when their publisher shut down.

"In a Reddit comment a long time ago, I was like, 'We're not going to make a sequel! Why would we do that? We'll just update the first one,'" as Slay the Spire co-creator Casey Yano says in Edge Magazine issue #423. "But I guess we were a little naive."

I've been unable to track down that specific Reddit comment from Yano, but it's easy to see how a small indie studio, flush with the unexpected success of a breakout hit, might consider just continuing to update it forever. After all, that strategy has worked for the likes of Terraria, Stardew Valley, and No Man's Sky – why not Slay the Spire?

It seems a big part of the issue is Humble Games, the now-defunct publishing arm of Humble Bundle. Humble Games handled Slay the Spire's console and mobile ports, but when the label shut down in 2024, those versions of Slay the Spire were suddenly in some form of limbo. Yano doesn't go into the specifics of the status of Humble's Slay the Spire ports here, but it seems there's quite a roadblock here.

"We couldn't just work more on Slay the Spire 1, because its future was very murky," Yano explains. On top of the issues with the console and mobile ports, there's also all the existing PC mods to consider. If Mega Crit wanted to make any real additions to the Slay the Spire formula, "then it would have to be a sequel."

Slay the Spire 2's fate twisted again when Mega Crit literally flipped a coin to decide on its next project. Years later, the king of roguelike card games is back in rare form, with what feels like the entirety of the first game remolded and expanded. We've got new classes, cards, relics, and enemies, but ask any Ironclad, Silent, or Defect player and they'll tell you Slay the Spire 2 very much feels like home.

Slay the Spire 2 almost had fewer new cards because of the co-creator's love for Dark Souls, but testers "were not jiving with that at all."