All Slay the Spire 2 playable characters and how to unlock them

Slay the Spire 2 has five different characters available at launch, and they offer you different ways to enjoy the game.

When you start your adventure, you can only select a single character. However, the list of available options can increase pretty quickly. Let’s look at all five characters, their in-game stats, and how you can unlock them.

How to unlock all characters in Slay the Spire 2

As I mentioned earlier, there are five characters. The table below shows their names and how you can unlock them.

Name	How to Unlock
The Ironclad	Available from the start.
The Silent	Participate in a single run with Ironclad.
The Regent	Participate in a single run with Silent.
The Necrobinder	Participate in a single run with Regent
The Defect	Participate in a single run with Necrobinder

You can unlock all five characters in as little as five minutes. The method is pretty simple. You begin a run with a character, and then press the Esc button. Choose to Give Up from the menu. While your run ends prematurely, it counts as participation. Hence, you’ll unlock the applicable character from your complete (but terrible) run.

All character stats in Slay the Spire 2

All five characters in Slay the Spire 2 start with 99 coins, but their health, relics, and roles will be completely different.

Character Name	Health (starting)	Roles	Relic
The Ironclad	80	Fighter	Burning Blood: Heal 6 HP at the end of combat.
The Silent	70	Hunter	Ring of the Snake: Draw 2 additional cards at the end of each combat.
The Regent	75	Wizard	Divine Right: Gain three stars at the start of each combat.
The Necrobinder	66	Dark Wizard	Bound Phylactery: Summon 1 at the start of a turn.
The Defect	75	A bit of all rounder	Cracked Core: Channel 1 Lightning at the start of each combat.

The post All Slay the Spire 2 playable characters and how to unlock them appeared first on Destructoid.

Marathon is finally out. The game, which saw huge activity during its free-to-play server slam, replicated its previous success by opening to over 86,000 players, this time at a $40 price tag. Of course, this is being described as a “flop” by some, because we simply cannot have nice things in 2026.

Negative narratives around basically anything nowadays tend to form rather quickly, often propagated by people (and of course bots) who never actually experienced the thing they’re hating. It seems that nowadays, following the “Fall of Concord” back in 2024, games have to blow it out of the park every single time lest they be considered complete failures.

Highguard was a recent example, and even if that game doesn’t really scream quality at the top of its lungs, it certainly didn’t deserve the hate train coming its way, boarded almost exclusively by those without any hours clocked in the title.

And now Marathon is on the chopping block.

During its development, Marathon was marred by problems and hitches. It had several directors swapped out, had a few playtests that weren’t so well-received by those who participated in them, and so on. It crossed out every prerequisite for “development hell,” indicating the actual release would be a terrible experience for Bungie and perhaps the final nail in its coffin.

But that turned out not to be true, even during the server slam. It had over 130,000 concurrent players at that point and has over 86,000 now that the game costs $40 U.S. dollars. Nothing about Marathon tells us that it’s a flop or a failure or even underperforming for that matter.

And those are just the Steam numbers, which I imagine represent about half of its total player base, if not less.

The hate train keeps chugging along, however, no matter what.

While browsing X, I spotted one user arguing that, since Marathon is performing worse than Destiny and the recently released Slay the Spire 2 (which costs about 50 percent less than Marathon), it must be considered a “complete flop of a game” and, of course, as “Concord 3.0″ (the other one being Highguard).

“Marathon is dead on arrival,” another user wrote. Dexerto, a video game outlet, also compared Slay the Spire 2‘s performance to Marathon, saying the former “beats out” Bungie’s shooter, as if the two were ever comparable, both in price and genre.

The narrative is forming and slowly being propagated by so many people and even news outlets, who use superficial arguments to frame a game as a failure despite the fact that it had probably earned over three and a half million USD if we go by Steam’s concurrent numbers alone, which are in fact much larger, especially when consoles are taken into account.

And what’s worse, it’s people who either didn’t play the game or haven’t even seen what it has to offer. Those who did say it’s a good title, with it having 81 percent positive reviews on Steam at the time of writing, which improved as the launch day progressed, and are set to grow as time goes by.

Compare that to Highguard‘s 45 percent and its myriad of regions that have it at mostly negative or even worse. Highguard was also a free game that ended up flopping, whereas Marathon is already raking in a lot of cash that should see it sustained for the foreseeable future.

Online arguments and narratives have become so toxic and tiresome, to the point where I’m almost willing to give up on trying to reason with people and to pragmatically view every single game on a case-by-case basis. Why do we have to go out of our way to frame things negatively before they’re even out or without trying them for ourselves, at least for a little while?

I have every hope that Marathon will succeed and grow into a great game, because as I noted in one of my recent features, its art direction deserves all the praise it can get, as that’d prove to developers that giving a damn about looks (not just in terms of graphics) is crucial for a successful title.

The post Marathon opens to great numbers on Steam—but a hateful narrative is already forming because this is the internet in 2026 appeared first on Destructoid.