Sandbox / Downfall (Slay the Spire)

Downfall is a fanmade expansion mod for the roguelike Deck Building Game Slay the Spire created by Table 9 Studios. Its main claim to fame is the new "Downfall" campaign, where you play as one of eight villain characters (most of whom are bosses) protecting the Spire from heroes who seek to destroy it. Each character comes with new mechanics, cards, relics, potions, and more.

The game also features a new hero character, the Hermit, who gets equal billing to the four canonical heroes. He is a cursed Gunslinger whose gameplay style has a theme of turning downsides into advantages.

See also Tales & Tactics, a game by the same developers.

In addition to the tropes in Slay the Spire, this mod provides examples of:

• Adaptation Expansion: The developers invented and expanded a lot of mechanics to have enough material for the Promoted to Playable characters' card pools. The playable Automaton in particular has little to do with the corresponding boss fight, instead taking inspiration from programming.^note The most noteworthy concept of its boss fight, Stasis, is already used by the Guardian. Otherwise, the fight is fairly straightforward, with its memorable HYPER BEAM attack making more sense as an individual attack card than the basis of an entire mechanic.
• Anti-Frustration Feature:
  • The Hexaghost's Ghostflame Ignitions are consistently programmed to work in the player's favour:
    • Several of the character's cards have a bonus effect if the current Ghostflame is ignited. If playing such a card will ignite the flame, you still get the bonus. Cards that provide a bonus for each ignited Ghostflame work similarly. However, Sword of Night and Shield of Night have the opposite mechanic: they give you an energy if the current flame is not ignited. You still get the energy if playing an "of Night" card ignites the current flame.
    • If you play a card that meets the requirements to Ignite the current Ghostflame, and whose effect also says "Ignite the current Ghostflame", its effect will trigger twice instead of making you waste one ignition.
    • Igniting the Inferno Ghostflame normally deals damage for each active Ghostflame, then extinguishes all other Ghostflames. However, if it's activated multiple times by a card, it will hit the same number of times for each additional ignition instead of making those ignitions near worthless.
    • If you play a card with an Advance or Retract effect (i.e. move around the wheel of Ghostflames), the active ghostflame will ignite before you advance/retract to avoid confusion.
  • The Snecko's Muddle mechanic randomizes card costs. However, the "Snekproof" keyword makes a card's cost immune to muddling. This keyword is usually put on cheap cards that help give the Snecko something to do even if its Random Effect Spells turn out to be mostly garbage, or a bad Muddle returned a hand full of high costs. Notable examples include Restock (which draws a bunch of new cards) and Soul Roll (a 0-cost card that muddles your hand to reroll the costs).
  • Ectoplasm has the same drawback as in the base game: you can no longer earn the game's currency. However, since Downfall adds a "you have to pay to break the keys if you want to reach act 4" mechanic, it also makes Ectoplasm lift the cost of breaking the keys so that picking it can't screw you out of act 4.
• The Bad Guy Wins: In the "best" ending of Downfall mode, your Villain Protagonist kills both the heroes and the one who keeps resurrecting them, permanently putting an end to threats against the Spire.
• Bandit Mook: The Merchant has become a recurring boss fight who always attacks in the same pattern: armour up, fling coins, steal souls, and escape. Getting your souls back generally takes multiple encounters.
• Cast from Hit Points: The Slime Boss's "Tackle" attacks have a good damage output for their cost, but also deal a little damage to you. Notably, this is damage, not HP loss, so it can be blocked. Additionally, the Slime Boss's starting relic allows him to recover some HP during fights to compensate for any losses caused by Tackles.
• Confusion Fu: Snecko's cards include not just randomising card costs, but getting other characters' random cards, including ambiguous cards that change between rooms. (They'll always be "a Dexterity card" or "a Power card", and can be disambiguated at campfires.) By default you select which three other characters you can get cards from at the start of an ascent, with the option to increase the difficulty by opening your pool to all other characters.
• Damage-Increasing Debuff: The Slime Boss's "Goop" Status Effect. For each stack of Goop, your next attack will do 1 additional damage to the enemy and Consume the Goop (resetting the number of stacks to 0). There's an attack that doesn't Consume Goop while still giving you the benefit of increased damage, and an attack that deals damage depending on the target's Goop.
• Damage Over Time: At the start of the enemy's turn, the Collector's signature "Doom" debuff drains its HP according to the number of stacks. However, it then goes away unless the enemy had both Weak and Vulnerable at the start of its turn (or you used the one card with the debuff "prevent the next time Doom would be removed from this enemy").
• Dead Man's Hand: The Hermit, an undead gunslinger, has a card named "Dead Man's Hand" that draws the rarest cards from your deck. Its beta art depicts a poker hand containing two black aces and two black eights, with the eight of spades being blood-stained and the fifth card having a skull instead of a suit and a letter or numeral.
• Difficult, but Awesome: The Automaton's cards have unimpressive stats, and trying to put together a "good stuff" deck with him will probably get you killed. However, his synergies have strong payoffs if you can pull them off.
• Early Game Hell: The Snecko suffers from a rough early game due to how its Unidentified card gimmick works: early on, you have few to no good cards locked in, and identifying one spends a rest site, meaning that Snecko gets fewer upgrades than the other characters, and for each combat, its gets a new batch of random cards that may or may not be useful. The Snecko's own card pool is not very impressive by itself, so you can't rely on that either. Fortunately, things get better for the Snecko after it identifies some strong cards and manages to pick up some Snecko cards that add a lot of value to other cards.
• Evil All Along: In the original game, Ranwid offered slayers a random relic in exchange for a potion, a card, or gold. It turns out he's giving them useless garbage on purpose on behalf of the Spire bosses.
• For Doom the Bell Tolls: When an enemy dies to the "Doom" debuff, a church bell sound effect is played.
• Level in Reverse: In Downfall mode, you traverse the Spire backwards. Notably, this means that you always start with a rest site, but you don't get a rest site before the final boss.
• Mechanically Unusual Fighter: The Gremlins have a 5-in-1 gimmick. Each gremlin has a bonus effect depending on who's in front, and only the front gremlin will be targeted by attacks. To compensate, each individual gremlin has low HP.
• Mirror Match: One of the options in the Downfall version of the Mind Bloom event is "I am an Echo", which has you fight the enemy version of your character.^note Although the Gremlin Leader is not part of the Gremlins character, they will still face her Act 2 elite fight instead of the Act 1 Gremlin Gang fight, presumably because an Act 1 hallway fight would be a total pushover by the time Mind Bloom appears. Similarly, the Snecko faces a buffed version of the Act 2 hallway fight Snecko.
• Never Needs Sharpening: The Automaton's "It's a Feature" card lets you gain Strength and Dexterity whenever you draw a Deck Clogger. Flavor-wise, it's a jab at people who pass off bugs as features.
• Perspective Flip: The bosses and elites of the original game are now the player characters, and vice versa.
• Power at a Price:
  • Zig-zagged with The Collector's Pyre mechanic. While having to burn her own cards to get an effect is flavoured like the price of her power, between the fact that you can burn unwanted cards (Deck Cloggers, weak basic cards, anything that doesn't work well against the current encounter…), that some cards reward you for burning them, and that two cards let you get back the Pyred card in a way that helps you play it, there are plenty of ways to turn it into an advantage.
  • The Transient's Collected card grants a whopping 6 Strength immediately, but will kill you 6 turns later.
• Promoted to Playable: This mod lets you play as six previously non-playable bosses from Slay the Spire, as well as two normal enemies.
• Quirky Miniboss Squad: The Gremlins are Act One common mooks who collectively act as a single playable character to be as effective as the Spire's other Elites and Bosses. Each one only has a fifth of their total health, though, less than many enemy attacks, and a dead gremlin's skills are inaccessible until you can revive them at a campfire.
• Randomized Transformation: The Snecko's main gimmick is that it can collect Unidentified cards with names like "Unidentified Rare Card". These cards transform into random eligible cards between each combat. However, you can Identify such a card at a rest site, which locks it into what it is at the time.
• Recurring Boss: In the unmodded game, the Merchant claimed to be a former adventurer, and his unexplained appearance in Act Four right before the True Final Boss may have raised questions about how he is in a fight. The answer: good enough to conduct regular hit-and-run attacks to pilfer souls from the Spire's best agents. Unless you've avoided him long enough to build an exceptional combo deck, he's likely to take several encounters to defeat.
• Sadistic Choice: If you encounter the Gremlin Leader as the Gremlins, you'll be forced to choose between giving up one of your gremlins permanently, or refusing and having her start the fight with a buff. Likewise, if you encounter Gremlin Nob with the Gremlins, you'll have to choose between giving up all your souls or having him start the fight with a buff.
• She Is the King: Although the Collector is female, her "Form" card is called "Dark Lord Form", presumably because "Dark Lady Form" doesn't have the right connotations or ends up sounding like a weird reference to her "lady form" — not ideal for a dark sorceress who is not sexualized whatsoever and whose body is entirely obscured.
• Socketed Equipment: The Guardian has cards with Sockets, and 0-energy cards named Gems with simple effects. At rest sites, you can place Gems into Sockets to add their effect to the Socket card and remove the Gem from your deck. The risk of this mechanic is that when you receive them, the Gems are low-impact cards that make it harder to draw your good cards. Oh, and there's a couple of cards that exist solely for you to stuff multiple Gems into them, and an attack that deals a lot of damage if you have a lot of Gems (socketed or not) but removes the Gems for the rest of the fight.
• Stance System: The Champ's main mechanic is his Stance system: Berserker and Defensive provide relevant benefits when you play a Skill, and some cards have bonus effects that rely on a stance being active. To encourage switching between them, you can only get three Skill bonuses per stance activation, exiting a stance gives a bonus, and there are several "Finisher" cards that can only be played while in a stance and exit your stance. There is also the rare Ultimate Stance, which has the benefits of both stances and will be re-entered if you exit it manually, but only lasts until the end of the turn it was entered in.
• Symmetric Effect:
  • The Hermit's starter relic gives him a Memento, a 0-cost card that applies 1 Vulnerable to everyone. The impact can be made asymmetric by using it when the enemies aren't attacking, by killing the enemies before they get the chance to retaliate, using some kind of damage reduction like Rugged or Intangible, or blocking or removing the debuff.
  • Midnight adds a curse called Impending Doom to the Hermit's hand. If Impending Doom is in the middle of the Hermit's hand at the end of his turn, everyone takes 13 damage.
  • An earlier version of Purgatory dealt a large chunk of damage to everyone, including the Hermit himself. The idea was to use Rugged to decrease the Hermit's damage to 2 while the enemies still get the full hit.
• Take That!: The beta art of It's a Feature (a card that makes fun of passing off bugs as features) features a Bland-Name Product of Fallout 76, a game notorious for being buggy.
• Too Important to Walk: The Collector spends the entire game lounging on a chair carried by two of her Torchhead minions.
• Villain Protagonist: In Downfall mode, your character is trying to protect the Spire and its Corrupt Heart from the base game's protagonists.
• Weird Currency: Bosses use souls to purchase supplies and have no use for gold, which confuses the Looters and Muggers you encounter.
• You Are Already Dead:
  • Hexaghost's Soulburn debuff inflicts a delayed HP loss equal to the number of stacks. An enemy with enough stacks of Soulburn is already dead (unless it has the rare ability to cleanse its debuffs), but it might take several turns for it to actually die.
  • Like the Silent's poison, the Collector's Doom deals damage to the enemy at the start of its turn. An enemy might have a fatal amount of Doom, but won't actually die before you end your turn.

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YMMV

• Complacent Gaming Syndrome: When playing the draft variation of Snecko, most players will pick Ironclad cards if possible. Why? Most Downfall characters rely on cards designed to synergize with their unique gimmicks, but the Ironclad has a lot of generally useful effects like Vulnerable and Strength scaling, which boost the damage of any attack card. His Exhaust theme is nice too — you can exhaust bad cards to get rid of them, and Feel No Pain and Dark Embrace (whenever a card is exhausted, you respectively gain some block or draw a card) can be very good with both the Ironclad's own Exhaust cards and other characters who exhaust cards for whatever reason (the Gremlins generate a lot of 0-cost cards that exhaust themselves, the Afterlife and Pyre mechanics get even better…).
• Fan Nickname: "Slimbo" for Slime Boss and "Hexa" for Hexaghost.
• Game-Breaker:
  • The 0-energy card Sadistic Nature, which deals damage whenever you apply a debuff, was removed from Downfall Mode because it turned out to be busted on some of the villain characters, in particular the Slime Boss (who can apply Goop with his spammable "Lick" cards), the Hexaghost (who likes to use Soulburn for damage), the Gremlins (Fat Gremlin applies Weak for free every time you attack with it in front, and the Gremlins have easy access to cheap attacks) and the Collector (who has a debuff-stacking theme).
  • Ghost Shield is an infamously good Hexaghost card that arguably did its job of patching up the character's defensive problems too well. At 1 energy for 7 (10) Block, it doesn't seem too impressive at first, but it has the Afterlife keyword, which lets you have the effect for free if it's exhausted somehow. And it has Ethereal, so it exhausts itself at the end of your turn if it's still in your hand. On top of that, it gives you 1 Blur (which lets you keep excess block for one turn) when exhausted. Not only does this mean the block won't go to waste if you draw Ghost Shield when no one is attacking, but you can rack up stupid amounts of block if you pick up multiple copies — which you'll probably be able to because it's a common card.
• Low-Tier Letdown:
  • The Guardian relic Pick of Rhapsody gives you the option to Mine for Gems at rest sites. Unfortunately, while socketing gems is a free action, you can only do it before Mining, meaning you're stuck with the Gems in your deck until the next rest site — not great when unsocketed Gems are pretty underwhelming. If you don't like the Gems you got, too bad, you can't even turn them down. If you want to make your deck better, just using the rest site to upgrade a card is more reliable and less risky. The Pick has the silver lining of letting you mine for one Gem at the Gem Mine event, but even then it's a letdown relic because the issue of getting an unwanted Gem remains, and the relic has no immediate benefit when you receive it.
  • The Maw and Tick, two of the Act 3 Collected cards, are notoriously bad:
    • The Maw is essentially a Bludgeon — a single big hit for 3 energy. This might have been useful if you were the Ironclad in Act 1, where such an attack helps you kill squishy enemies fast, but when you have a far stronger character and are in Act 3 (where it's not one-hit killing anything), it just sucks. The icing on the cake is the opportunity cost — you have to waste three essences you could have spent on a good Collected card to pick up The Maw.
    • Tick is a 1-energy card that does nothing but give you a Tock the next turn. Similarly, Tock costs 2 and only gives you a Headcrush next turn. Then, if you spend 3 energy on Headcrush, you get the payoff — 70 Area of Effect damage. While this is not a bad effect — it devastates multi-enemy hallway fights — the card suffers from being slow, especially if you draw it late (which is not unlikely considering that you hopefully have a nice Collected pile by the time you reach Act 3). Moreover, if you're so desperate for Area of Effect damage that you'd take Tick, you'll probably die before you even get to pick one up. And, finally, it suffers from the same opportunity cost as all bad Collected cards.
  • The Snecko has a lot of crappy cards, with some of the worst stinkers including:
    • Dice Crush is a 2-energy attack that deals random damage between 10 and 16. Not only is this unreliable, but it's unimpressive even if you get the highest value, and a low roll is worse than playing two Strikes. Dice Block is a block card with the same gimmick and the same problems. Their only redeeming quality is that their value is significantly better if you can Muddle their cost down to 1 or 0… but that's also true for the game's myriad of better 2-cost cards (and 3+ cost cards for that matter).
    • Iron Fang takes the already-mediocre Ironclad card Iron Wave and adds unreliability to its issues, with the only compensation being that the average output is marginally better than that of Iron Wave. And this one is a 1-cost, so even Muddling down the cost doesn't do much for it.
    • Dice Boulder is an unreliable attack that borrows the gimmick of Searing Blow — it's underwhelming, but can become good if you upgrade it repeatedly. Unfortunately, the opportunity cost of spending all your upgrades on one card is even worse for the Snecko than for the Ironclad, since the Snecko really wants to spend its rest sites on identifying (i.e. locking in) powerful unidentified cards. At least it's a 2-cost, so it synergizes well with Muddle if you manage to give it enough upgrades.
  • While some characters can make good use of it, Velvet Choker deserves a mention for being awful on the Gremlins. Its effect of "you get extra energy, but can only play 6 cards per turn" mixes very poorly with the Gremlins' usual strategy of spamming cheap cards, and they have little to compensate.
  • Blue Candle already suffered from being a do-nothing relic in many Slay the Spire runs, but Downfall arguably makes it worse than nothing due to its unfavourable interaction with the new Curses. The relic's two effects are making Unplayable Curse cards playable, at the cost of making each played Curse card cost you one HP. The problem is that most of the Curses introduced in Downfall are playable by default, so all Blue Candle does is making them cost HP in addition to energy.
  • Soul of Chaos turns Hexaghost's fourth ghostflame into a Mayhem Ghostflame that can play a random card from the top of your deck for free. Unfortunately, most of Hexaghost's card pool rewards planning, deliberate plays and careful sequencing — the exact opposite of what this relic offers. Some players would rather skip it than take it!

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Trivia

• Approval of God: Mega Crit approves of the mod, as shown in this announcement on the Slay the Spire page describing it as "a great way to experience the game again in a unique way" and announcing that the mod was allowed its own Steam page.