The Killing Stone review
God does not play dice, but the Devil is a big fan of Slay the Spire. Or at least this devil is—a smirk-masked harlequin with one glowing, violet eye and a voice like honeyed hemlock. He has ensnared the soul of your mentor, a 17th-century Danish lawyer, themselves once an apprentice to the infamously doomed Dr Faust (and, as it transpires, a powerful witch). But upon her death, the devil has not received his due. Your mentor has cunningly bound the fate of her soul in reams of metaphysical legalese, ensnaring several generations of her surviving family who have been used, unwittingly, as sin-eaters. It is your job to venture to an isolated mansion in the distant north, whence your mentor's brood has been banished, and play a thorny and demanding deck-building game against a variety of hellspawn—a proxy for wrangling over the spiritual fine-print—hoping to free the family from an infernal fate, wrest your mentor's soul from the demonic One-Eye's grasp, and, perhaps, earn that which she has bequeathed you.
Yet, what is this inheritance you are owed? And how welcome?
This sort of glib summation doesn't do justice to how genuinely sinister and even profound this game actually is. Much of it written in unsparingly period-accurate English that is as playful and dense as the literature of that time, crammed with allusion and double-meanings. I have to admit, as a former medievalist and writer of pseudo-historical early-modern occult fiction, The Killing Stone aims squarely for the bulbous, flashing weak-spot on my exposed arse. I am pathetically bedazzled by the audacity and ambition here, but, exhaustingly clever though this is, I don't think it's simply an exercise in self-regard: the game, appropriately enough, has soul.
If the 17th-century idiom is too much, you can toggle a more modern language version, though I think you lose some of the colour.
Between card battles, you are free to explore the mansion in first-person, and your dialogues with its benighted inhabitants paint them with complexity and sympathy. These poor saps do not necessarily share your mentor's witchy ways, but have nevertheless been condemned by them twice: first by the God-fearing folk of Denmark, and by their grandmatron herself in a much more grievous way.
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