Would an “Undo” button ruin Slay The Spire 2?

I’ve been thinking about this topic quite a lot lately, thanks, at first, to Mewgenics—a game that will cheerfully fuck an entire 45-minute run if you misunderstand, say, exactly how bad some of your kitties’ debilitations can be—and then even more with the recent Early Access release of Slay The Spire 2. Mega Crit’s sequel to its massively successful “Whoops, everything is cards now” turn-based RPG isn’t quite as brutal about a screw-up as Edmund McMillen and Tyler Glaiel’s cat-astrophe simulator, but it can still absolutely punish you for a misclick. (Forget to build up enough Block to survive an incoming attack? Forget that one of your Defect’s powers is eating that orb you expected to give you a little extra armor? Misplay your stars as the officious, galactically powerful Regent? Say hi to Neow for me when you get back to the bottom of the tower.)

And while these two games couldn’t be more different aesthetically, they share one major commonality: A total dedication to forcing the player to live with those mistakes. Neither game (sans modding) has an undo button, no merciful judge you can plead your case to because you moved your cat to the wrong spot or discarded the wrong card from your hand. Everything you do in each of these games’ turns is a commitment, and if you commit to the wrong thing, hey, them’s the breaks. (Mewgenics actually takes things even further, invoking the spirit of Animal Crossing’s fabled Mr. Resetti to punish players who try to manipulate the timeline by quitting the game and reloading before the mistake in question went down.)

Is this “break it, bought it” approach to game design an automatic assumption of the roguelike space? I find myself thinking about games like Subset Games’ Into The Breach, which walks an artful middle of the road here: In that game, your last mech’s movement can always be undone, lest you get screwed over by a moment of bad positioning; even more extremely, you’re allowed a single full reset of any especially gnarly turn in order to rethink your plans and try to save a few more of the last remaining humans from being bug chow. This temporal fluidity allows freedom to plan—but also invites a certain perfectionist flavor of analysis paralysis, as I endlessly tinkered with placements in hopes of discovering an optimal outcome. (And that’s before we get into games so generous with their rewinds as to be no kind of roguelikes at all; Tom Francis’ excellent Tactical Breach Wizards makes a selling point of allowing players to rewind to the start of a turn at will, allowing you to game things out to the point of either victory or madness.)

Philosophically, I’m usually enough of a “live with it”-type asshole as to be more inclined to the “no undo” camp—but ask me again when I’ve just botched an attempt at getting a Shiv deck going in Slay The Spire 2, or triggered a Blood Frenzy cascade in Mewgenics. This far into the roguelike boom, complexity itself has become a selling point, with Mewgenics featuring hundreds of items and abilities that can bounce off each other in not-always-predictable ways, while Slay The Spire 2 invites players to toy with strategies that break the game’s established rules in half. In those moments, the hardline “never undo ever” stance can force players into a dilemma that neither developer likely wants them in: Choosing between doing something interesting, and doing something safe. Sometimes a safety net is only there to let your players get up to even more ridiculous and delightful stunts; when it’s down to undo or die, a little mercy can go a long way.