Holiday gaming plans in shambles as Slay the Spire 2 gets delayed to March 2026

Slay the Spire 2, the sequel to one of the defining PC games of the last decade, is going to be late—and the developers swear it's not because of Hollow Knight: Silksong.

"We got together as a team to determine our new release window before Silksong’s date was announced," Mega Crit's community manager wrote in an update on Steam today. "The timing just worked out like that, but on the bright side, everyone can keep busy playing Silksong during the wait!"

It's a tongue-in-cheek way to frame the delay, since Slay the Spire 2 didn't yet have a set release date—it was previously announced to be coming sometime before the end of 2025. That's now moved to an as-yet-unspecified Thursday in March 2026, a target Mega Crit says it's "confident [it] can hit." The only real reason for the delay? They keep making more game.

"Compared to Slay the Spire 1's early access launch (and for that matter its final 2.0 form) this new sequel has a lot more content that we can't wait to share with you," the update adds. "In addition, we want to make sure we're upholding the quality bar that both we and the gaming community have come to expect for early access titles."

Mega Crit offered up a juicy example of the broader scope it's aiming for in Slay the Spire 2: every time you reach a new act during a run, you'll be presented with two branches which "differ radically in their environments, enemies, events, and bosses, all of which greatly increase the variety of gameplay between runs."

Act 1's "B route," the Underdocks (Image credit: Mega Crit Games)

Act one begins with two possible paths through Overgrowth ("a lush, tangled ruin with much of its fauna resembling mystical woodland creatures and sentient flora that might just eat you alive") and Underdocks ("a miry waterway connected to the Spire's sewer system, from which all manner of mutant sea creatures and vagrants might emerge"). Acts two and three will see their own alternate paths added during early access.

Sounds like we have some increasingly complicated buildcrafting and route-planning in our futures. But if you too were planning to use Slay the Spire 2 as the primary means by which to ignore friends and family over the holiday break in an all-encompassing deckbuilding fugue: I hope this news doesn't hit you too hard. At least Monster Train 2 is real good.