The sudden announcement and release day of Slay the Spire 2 certainly got the gaming world to pay attention.

Several games shifted their release dates to adapt, much as many did for Silksong and Hades 2 last year, but those that didn’t, including the mighty Marathon, have already been affected and seen their player counts reduce by comparison.

And it just broke another concurrent player record with over 400,000 people playing, the most of ANY roguelike on Steam’s storefront. Staggering!

Slay the Spire 2 is, of course, the sequel to the massively successful Slay the Spire which was one of the original roguelike deckbuilders that has inspired so many incredible games.

This time, it’s in early access on Steam only for now and has already been five years in development. There’s returning characters as well as new ones and all have their own cards, motives and secrets, with new environments foes and storylines.

The game has a new co-op mode where up to four players can team up to face the challenges of the Spire, and this will include multiplayer specific cards, as well as unique synergies.

Wildly, Slay the Spire 2 already has more content than its predecessor and it just launched into early access, so we cannot wait to see where this roadmap takes the game. But for now, you can grab Slay the Spire 2 on Steam for £19.99 and it seems pretty clear that’s all anyone wants to talk about or play this weekend.

For good reason. What a year it’s already been for independent games…