So I recently played through Take Me To The Dungeon (https://www.dlsite.com/maniax/work/=/product_id/RJ01654507.html) and I have to say, it’s probably the most inspired Slay the Spire clone I’ve ever experienced. It’s not entirely fair to refer to it as a Slay the Spire clone since really the gameplay is closer to a weird fusion between gloomhaven’s combat and a roguelike deckbuilder, but to me at least it feels like it inherits a lot of the design considerations that make Slay the Spire so good (and the fact that most of its copycats don’t is why they tend to fall flat in my opinion.) Chiefly, it understands that for any of the choices you make to matter, the enemies have to be varied and threatening enough that you’re always actively trying to build around them. In this case the choices aren’t about what cards to take since you start each dive with a deck you’ve built and customized already, but about just how many elites you think you can afford to fight versus taking recolor fights/event tiles/chest tiles for safer but slightly lesser rewards. For all this to make sense let me first explain how the gameplay works. Much like gloomhaven you build out a deck of 8-10 cards (the number goes up as you progress through the game) and slot in various enchantments that can add effects like giving a card more attack/block, adding burn stacks to your attack, making it cheaper, or making it more expensive in return for greater primary effects etc etc.

You then go into the dungeon and traverse through it in 20 node chunks with branching paths and so forth like a slay the spire map. In combat you start with your entire deck in your hand and between 5-7 energy each turn (the number goes up as you progress through the game.) You don’t discard anything at the end of the turn and once you’ve run out of cards, or have so few left that it’s not worth spending a turn playing just 1-2 of them you have to gloomhaven long rest, i.e. pick a card to exhaust and spend a turn doing nothing to get all your cards back. Exhausted cards do not return to your deck at the end of combat, and you can only get them back at campfires which are guaranteed before each midboss and boss fight and very very rarely might show up as a normal node. (I actually think one of the few flaws in this game is that they can show up outside of the midboss/boss fights at all because if you actually see one at an optimal time it significantly lowers the difficulty of clearing that tier. It’s rare enough that I only encountered an actually useful midpoint campfire once but it just shouldn’t be possible imo.) The way enemies are balanced is that if you’ve built out a good deck regular hallway fights shouldn’t require you to exhaust anything to clear, while elites might take 1-2 exhausts to kill at the start, and as more and more of your deck gets shaved off they take progressively more because you get to do even less each cycle. And the reason you can’t avoid elite fights is because the midbosses are always tuned such that a deck going in simply will not have the dps to kill before running out of cards no matter how well you’ve optimized it.

You need the relic rewards from elite fights to secure enough power to actually break past that wall, and every tier your choices effectively boil down to how many elites you think you can take, combined with how you want to design your deck. Will you make it more efficient at clearing elites at the cost of making things harder at the midboss? (the elite gimmicks and the midboss gimmicks tend to always be contrasting enough that if you’re optimizing for one you’re not optimizing for the other.) Will you do the opposite and hope just a few elite fights will get your overall deck power enough to clear if you build around the midboss to begin with? The game is balanced tightly enough that you actually have to ask these questions instead of just blasting your way to victory. You may have noticed I’ve been talking in terms of solely optimizing dps and eschewing block/healing entirely, but that’s where each tier’s boss comes in. The first half of each tier is about optimizing dps, whereas the bosses are all about survival. They’re (in relative terms) less tanky than the midboss of their tier and you probably have even more dps than you did during the midboss since you had even more nodes to farm overall power. However they hit way harder, and demand that you bring at least a few answers to their offensive gimmicks which means if you abandoned all defense to solve the midboss question you’re fucked.

All of this combines to make a very solid game that while it ramps up somewhat slowly (the first two acts feel tuned relatively easy to probably onboard you into the game’s systems) but ends up becoming something truly great. My only other main gripe is once you beat the final boss you get one of the most broken cards in the game that you can take into the true end stretch which sadly trivializes it but I suppose that’s just the power fantasy zephyr never gave us. After you beat the true end you also unlock a fully roguelike mode where you have to take in a preset shitty starter deck and there are now node rewards with new cards you can replace your starter ones with which is pretty fun in its own right but it feels even more slay the spire-y and less gloomhaven-y so while it’s still balanced well enough to be quite fun I felt like it lost some of the charm it had in exploring its weird fusion gameplay system.

Now that I’ve spent a billion words talking about the gameplay, let’s talk about the story. It’s…surprisingly good. Certainly not something that left a lasting impression on me but the character banter is fun and the plot ties together nicely by the end and I was engaged enough to care about whenever a new cutscene happened rather than wishing I was back to the gameplay already. There isn’t too much to say since it’s a pretty basic plot with simple but fun characters but at least it’s a net value add to the game so I’m glad it’s there. It’s also fully voiced for the people who care about that. One thing to note is a bunch of the character interactions happen in the event nodes in the dungeon while the main story cutscenes are wholly dedicated to the plot so if you’re not proactively trying to visit event nodes (which for gameplay purposes you kinda wanna be doing anyway fortunately) the pacing might seem really off. Art’s also surprisingly good I usually don’t like big booba designs but the ones in this game were nice. All in all an extremely solid game that I’m very happy I played, would recommend to fans of slay the spire or gloomhaven or both, or just fans of weird experimental gameplay in general.