Slay the Spire 2 came out on March 5, 2026, and I’ve barely put it down since. Game time has been scarce the last few weeks, but every spare hour has gone here. That tells you something.
Who are Mega Crit?
Before getting into why the game is so good, it’s worth knowing a bit about who made it. Mega Crit is an independent game studio based in Seattle, Washington, founded by Anthony Giovannetti and Casey Yano. The two met at UW Bothell, where they made Flash and mobile games together just for fun. After graduating with computer science degrees, both went and got jobs in the Seattle tech industry. Casey spent four years at Amazon as a QA engineer, and Anthony worked at a couple of local studios, before the itch to make games got too strong. They left their jobs in 2015 and started building what would become Slay the Spire.
Formerly a two-person studio, they’ve since grown the team and brought in collaborators for the sequel, but they remain entirely self-funded with no external investors. Which makes what they’ve pulled off even more remarkable.
What they pulled off
Slay the Spire 2 entered Steam Early Access on March 5, 2026, and immediately became the most-played deckbuilder in Steam history, peaking at over 574,000 concurrent players in the days following launch. On day one alone it hit over 282,000 concurrent players, landing third on Steam’s all-time daily concurrent chart, sitting behind only two of the most dominant titles on the platform.
Within its first week, the game had sold 3.3 million copies, with more than 25 million runs attempted. In the Steam community post where they shared this, developer Casey Yano opened with the words “HOLY MACKEREL” and noted that even though he’d thrown out his back from overworking, he was in high spirits.
The game currently holds an Overwhelmingly Positive rating on Steam across tens of thousands of reviews. To put the scale of this in context, Slay the Spire 2 attracted four times as many concurrent players as Bungie’s Marathon on its own launch day, and surpassed the all-time concurrent player peaks of Hades 2, Balatro, Vampire Survivors, and Mewgenics. This is a small Seattle indie studio, entirely self-funded, competing against and beating a major AAA Bungie shooter on Steam’s launch day chart. The original Slay the Spire peaked at 57,025 concurrent players across its entire lifetime. The sequel tripled that in its first hours.
Ok but is it actually good
Yes. Annoyingly so.
The original was genuinely excellent, one of those games that quietly redefined a genre and then got copied endlessly. The sequel takes everything that worked and builds on it in ways that feel meaningful rather than just padded out. The systems are deeper, the card interactions are more interesting, and there’s a lot more going on in the world itself. It’s set 1,000 years after the first game, the Spire has reawakened, and the whole thing has a slightly different energy that keeps it from feeling like a reskin.
But the thing that has really changed my experience is the four-player co-op mode. On our regular game Thursdays we’ve been running full four player sessions, and it works really well. Each player picks their own character, builds their own deck, and you have to figure out how to make your strategies complement each other against encounters that are clearly not designed to go easy on you. The chaos is part of the fun.
The co-op map drawing tool also deserves its own mention. Each player can draw on the shared map between rooms, presumably to plan routes and coordinate strategy. In practice, the map has looked like a medical textbook for the wrong specialty every single session. I suspect we are not unique in this. Mega Crit clearly agrees, because patch v0.100.0 quietly added an option to disable map drawings in multiplayer. That is a feature that only gets built when the data is overwhelming. I choose to see it as a community statistic rather than a problem.
They are shipping fast
Speaking of v0.100.0, the patch notes are worth a look just to understand how actively this game is being developed. A few weeks into early access and Mega Crit have already shipped a substantial update covering all five playable characters, enemy rebalancing, relic tweaks, event changes, multiplayer balance, new art, UI improvements, localization updates, and a long list of bug fixes.
A couple of the quality of life changes stand out. You can now skip relics at treasure chests, which sounds minor but matters a lot when a relic would actively hurt your build. Phobia Mode, an accessibility option for players sensitive to insects and creatures, got expanded with alternate visuals for several enemies. That’s a thoughtful thing to include and keep updating.
The multiplayer balance pass is also interesting. Several co-op specific cards got nerfed, which suggests Mega Crit is watching closely how the mode actually plays and adjusting accordingly. This isn’t a studio that shipped and moved on.
Still Early Access
Mega Crit has confirmed the game will remain in Early Access for one to two years before a full release, meaning what’s available now is an early look rather than the finished product. Even so, it already feels more complete and polished than most games that ship at version 1.0.
It costs $25 on Steam, there are no microtransactions, no season passes, nothing like that. You pay once, you get the game. Entirely in line with how Mega Crit has always operated.
I cannot wait to play more of it. If this is the early access version, the full release is going to be something.
