Conjury

A difficulty I have when reviewing Slay the Spire-likes is a certain anchoring bias. It can feel unfair to judge an otherwise good game, even partially, by dint of it being so aggressively inspired by a game that I consider, on a mechanical level, literally the best ever made. Conjury exists almost as a perfect distillation of this trickiness, because it is fundamentally a very good iOS game with much to love that — after a while of playing it — I cannot help but find wanting in comparison to its forebear. Structurally, and aesthetically, it is almost like a demake of Slay the Spire. Each run consists of a handful of acts, shorter and with fewer branches than Slay the Spire. Combat is a simplification of the same engine: using energy to play and draw cards, balancing attack and defense, leaning on emergent interactions between cards. And it is particularly well optimized for its format. It looks gorgeous on an iPhone; the pixel art is done just right, as are the audio and the…