You are about to experience Slay the Spire with me. I'm a new player in 2025, and I'm playing this because it's included on Game Pass, streaming on my Jerry Banfield Live YouTube channel and on Twitch, and I'm trying it for the very first time. I'm doing this in real time to give you my first impressions so you can see exactly what the real gameplay is for Slay the Spire in the first few minutes — and yeah, I'll have my live reactions in here, which I hope will be funny. Then I'm putting this up as a clip on my main Jerry Banfield channel. This is a strategy deck-building game from what I've heard, and I love deck-building games — I've been playing the Harry Potter one with the kids.
Let's see. We're going to try the Ironclad out and click Embark on the right. Oh my God, why is your camera so big? So you can really see my beautiful face. I know almost nothing about this game, and I'm going to just be playing it the way somebody who's totally clueless would play it. So you want to just click on a random one of these map nodes and see what happens.
Learning the Basics in Real Time
Here's what the game tells me: we want to defeat enemies by playing cards from my hand. Cards require energy to play, and once you are out, so is your turn. At the start of your turn, new cards are drawn and your energy is replenished. Okay. Play defensive cards to block when your enemies are about to attack you — block reduces incoming attack damage, but it wears off. All right. During your turn you can observe an enemy's intent — their intent on attacking you — so be sure to gain some block.
All right, so let's see how this goes. There's a silly-looking bird right here, and it doesn't look like he's attacking right now, so we've got a couple of strikes to play. I don't have enough energy for anything else, so I'm going to end the turn.
While I play, I'll mention I changed my YouTube channels around to just have one Jerry Banfield channel and one Twitch or live channel, and I'm really happy to see the algorithm is actually cranking videos out on my original channel — which is pretty amazing when my original channel has been almost worthless. It actually is cranking out views on my original channel. I'm amazed. Which is so cool.
All right, in this turn it looks like he's going to hit me for one because I blocked. So he's going to hit me for one, and I'm going to hit him for one. Next he's going to attack for nine, so we could Bash and then deal six to finish him. I'm going to Bash, then we'll go with a six-damage Strike, which will hit him — oh, it's not going to quite finish him, is it? And we're going to get smacked in the face because I didn't block.
A YouTube Algorithm Tangent Mid-Fight
Yeah, the algorithm is actually working. I know they seem to be updating it, and I'm impressed — the algorithm seems to be working a little bit. Oh, and that's the dead bird now. Somebody watching made the point that your bigger channel can do worse in the algorithm than your smaller one, and yeah, the YouTube algorithm is so interesting. I'm definitely going to do a big, in-depth live stream on the YouTube algorithm.
Back to the cards: this one applies one Weak to all enemies and can be played only if every card in your hand is an attack. This other one — deal six damage and add a copy of this card to your discard pile. Dang. All right, let's just try that. Proceed. You know, I'd like to do a little bit of a slower look at each card, but this game has us jumping in straight away — I had to do a card battle already, which honestly I'm beginning to appreciate. It gets me into the action. I want to do something to start, and this delivers.
Someone suggested my original channel might be shadow-banned or something. Oh, I'm going to need some serious blocking here. On my original channel the algorithm didn't work nearly as well before, but I don't know — they tweak the algorithm all the time. I'm just really impressed that I was able to put some ICP videos out on my original channel and they were able to get views, even if not quite as many as they'd get elsewhere.
Oh, now I can play Clash — let's go! Oh, how'd you like that? Good — you don't know how to do that, do you? You don't hear a lot of people doing Scarface impressions in Slay the Spire. Then again, I don't know — I've never watched anybody else play Slay the Spire before. Strike — no wait, Bash first, and then finish him. Die, you little wormy!
One more channel thought: somebody mentioned their videos only tend to go out to their existing audience, and yeah, mine's the same — most of my views only go out to my existing audience as well. I think that's pretty normal. I think YouTube is pretty conservative about putting new people in most of the time. Meanwhile, here's a card choice: deal seven damage, or deal twelve damage and it can be upgraded any number of times. Upgraded? Yeah, let's do that one. So I'm having fun — Slay the Spire is going pretty well so far.
Sloppy Plays and Piles of Poop
So we've got this little pile of poop here, and then this other pile of poop. We're going to kill this one — oh, you know what, it's nice that the damage lines up exactly. We could kill this one little turd, or we could block, because this one's going to deal ten. All right, we're getting five block. I don't want to let these attack twice, though — but you know what, I went and did it now, didn't I? All right, now I went and did it. I regretted that a little bit, because the five block was essentially wasted — I could have just attacked it and killed that one. It's kind of the same difference, though. I was hoping to get Clash, so we'll do a Defend. Oh no — oh wait, yeah, the game gives five block.
Then it says choose a card to upgrade — I ain't got any cards to upgrade! Do you see a card? I don't have a card. Oh, can I — oh, all right. No? Can I undo that? No. Disgusting. I've misfired. I dropped 18 — that's nice — I dropped 18 damage on the one that had one health. That's real nice, isn't it? Come on, man. Gone. Yo man, it's just ridiculous. I'd like to not be so sloppy — I'll be so sloppy, just throwing crap out. All right, so Clash — we need to get Defend out — oh, and Clash Plus. Oh, you take it! I really like the zero-cost cards, really.
Will I Come Back and Play Again?
So my main question for this game is: are we going to come back and play again another day? If you see me playing this game again, then the game is way above average, because most of the time I don't play a game more than once. I try a lot of new games, and I usually don't play them more than once. So this game is cool to start off. These are my first impressions of playing the game, and I did get a little bit of an emotional reaction playing it — which is ideal. If you want to see more of my gaming videos like this one, check out my Games playlist. Now let me blow your feet up.