#366: The gift

I’ve never really understood the whole ‘difficult second album’ thing — the idea that a band, overburdened by pressure, struggles to follow up a breakout success. The second album is easy, surely? You just do the same thing again, taking what you’ve learned from the making of your debut, and taking it on tour, to do another, hopefully slightly better version of the thing you've already done. That’s what the people want! More of the thing they like!

Led Zeppelin, like many of the great bands of their era, understood this perfectly. They wrote and recorded their second album while touring their first, and had it on shelves within nine months of their debut. There’s little to distinguish the two albums in a musical sense, but that’s precisely the point. The third album? That’s where things get tricky. Where critics and your fans start to expect some refinement, some signs of evolution. The second one is, or should be at least, a piece of piss.

That speaks, I think, to the wider issue here, and the reason that second-album syndrome has become such a useful shorthand in games of late: time. If Team Cherry, for instance, had bashed out Silksong in a Zeppish nine months, the game wouldn’t have reached its mythical status; the team would have found themselves under much less pressure to deliver a classic. But games don’t work like that, most of the time. They take too long to make. In the year or so leading up to Silksong’s release, when anticipation for it (and the fear of it never coming out) were reaching fever pitch, I used to joke in the Hit Points Discord that Team Cherry were gaming’s equivalent of The Stone Roses, one of the few bands to have truly struggled with their second album. Team Cherry, I would trollishly suggest, had also moved to a cottage in the country and got distracted. They’d got super into acid and Led Zeppelin, and were eventually going to release a blues album that hardly anyone really understood, and even fewer actually liked. (Ten Storey Love Song’s still a banger, mind you.)

Anyway, sorry, what was my point? Ah yes, timing. With all of the above in mind, I was a bit nervous ahead of the arrival of Slay The Spire II, the sequel to one of my favourite games of all time, one Steam tells me I have somehow played for 4,230 hours. Eight-and-a-half years after the first game hit early access, and seven years on from its full release, I worried that the pressure to deliver would weigh too heavily on developer Mega Crit; that, overly conscious of the passage of time, the crew would try to change too much — to evolve their sound, if I may continue with this increasingly unwieldy musical theme — rather than simply giving their fans more of what they love.

To my great delight, Slay The Spire 2 pulls off the greatest trick of all: it does both those things. It is exquisite sequel-making. Sure, there’s tons of new stuff in there, we’ll get onto that in a moment. But my favourite thing about it, I think, is how much of the old has been carried across. I knew, from the agonising drip of information Mega Crit allowed to leak out through its monthly newsletter in the yawning chasm of time between announcement and release, that three of the first game’s four characters would return in the sequel. But I feared that, burdened by the lengthy development, the team would strive excessively for reinvention; they would bring across those well-known characters, but effectively redesign them from scratch. Not a bit of it. Their starting cards are the same. Most of their expanded card pools are here too; a change in rarity here, the odd tweaked effect there, but many of them completely untouched.

The old lexicon also survives, each character’s suite of mechanical proper nouns brought over, their meanings and implications deliciously expanded. I could spend a couple of paragraphs telling you about all the filthy things you can now do with Vulnerable, or Shivs, or any of the other pre-existing keywords, but it would probably be a bit dry and offputtingly technical so I'll just say they're all here, and they're all bigger, broader, and more brilliant then ever. Mega Crit has brought them all across in a recognisable, familiar way — and then expanded their respective possibility spaces into the stratosphere. This, it occurs to me as I stab a big fish that goes invisible every other turn to death, is exactly what a good sequel should do.