Slay the Spire 2 devs weren't going to make a sequel, but then the publisher handling the first game's ports shut down and things got 'very murky'
Slay the Spire 2 has been one of those roguelike time vampires in recent weeks, for me—in between my usual binges of larger games, I tend to vanish into this genre for a bleary-eyed 80 hours because I can simply rinse and repeat, rather than having to worry about long-term narratives or complicated RPG systems.
Anyway, in my—oh my god, that can't be right. 118?—hours with Slay the Spire 2, I've come to feel like it's justified itself as a sequel. There's a lot of the same stuff going on, but there's also enough of a balance shift (and the inclusion of two new characters and co-op) to leave me satisfied.
But that wasn't originally the plan for MegaCrit. In Edge issue 423 (thanks, GamesRadar+), Mega Crit co-founder Casey Yano says that "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'."
Given you are reading an article about Slay the Spire 2, that didn't pan out: "I guess we were a little naïve."
The main reason had a lot to do with Humble Games going under back in 2024. Humble helped Mega Crit publish the game on consoles and mobile—without them, those versions of the game couldn't be supported (per the studio's FAQ).
Basically, it gets real hard to justify updating the PC version of your game when every single other version of it is beyond your reach to do anything about—either you leave console and mobile players in the lurch, or you risk entering a publishing rights quagmire. "We couldn’t just work more on Slay the Spire 1, because its future was very murky," Yano explains.
Eventually, the studio decided that if it wanted to go ahead with its plans, "it would have to be a sequel." And, hey—judging by the amount of hours I've spent on it already (the equivalent of around 2.8 working weeks. I need to get other hobbies) it wasn't the worst move in the world.
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