---
title: Conjury
type: Game
date: 2026-09-03
rating: 5
year: 2023
director: Dean Coulter
status: Finished
image: conjury.jpg
tags:
  - game
colorSortKey: [5, -32, 7]
---

A difficulty I have when reviewing [[slay-the-spire|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 scaffolding around it.

Where the game struggles, on the gameplay side, is in the monotony — both at a micro and a macro level. In a micro sense, encounters do very little to differentiate themselves from each other; even bosses feel fairly samey, and whatever variety a given fight offers comes much more from the order in which your cards are dealt than from any need to tailor your tactics or decision-making to the enemy you happen to be facing.

At a macro level, the various characters you can play in Conjury do feel fresh and distinct from one another, but repeated runs of a *given* character do not. This would be much less of a problem if it weren't for the fact that, in order to unlock new characters, you have to grind through a lot of runs. Where Slay the Spire is very generous with handing you new mechanics and play styles and characters as soon as you're ready to appreciate them, Conjury makes the exercise feel daunting and chore-like. In a way — and to its credit — that is not entirely dissimilar from games of the era whose aesthetic it so successfully emulates.

---

So it's not as good as Slay the Spire. Is that so brutal a condemnation? No.

And, to end on an earnest and positive note: the more honest comparison would be with other iOS games, where all of my quibbles are rendered moot. I don't think it's unreasonable to say that the average iOS game ranges somewhere from offensive to actively malicious. Obviously, there are many counterexamples. But if you're evaluating this game from the perspective of *is this a better choice than anything else on the App Store, given that I've already played Slay the Spire to exhaustion?*, the answer is an emphatic yes. Hmm.