Ashly Burch Has 270 Hours in Slay the Spire 2, Mostly on Deck

Ashly Burch’s most-played game right now sits at 270 hours, and almost none of it is co-op. That’s the number worth pulling from PC Gamer’s latest Disk Cleanup, in which the voice of Aloy, Chloe, and Tiny Tina walks through her library and reveals she does most of her gaming on a Steam Deck. Slay the Spire 2 is still in early access, and Burch freely admits it isn’t as tight as the original yet, but she’s already grinding toward Ascension 10. Run-based, single-session, trivially suspendable: this is a roguelike habit shaped by hardware as much as by taste.

Her library reads like a handheld playbook. Fields of Mistria for zoning out after a day in a writer’s room, Kentucky Route Zero sitting unfinished for 13 years, and a rotating stack of detective games — Blue Prince, Lorelei and the Laser Eyes, Return of the Obra Dinn, Chants of Sennaar. Then there’s the line that will get quoted everywhere: games have too many stoic, cool, badass archetypes, and she wants ‘more shtty little btches.’ For handheld players, all of it matters more than it might first appear.

270 Hours, Mostly Singleplayer: The Roguelike-to-Deck Pipeline

The way Burch describes her Spire habit — ‘I’m waiting for this thing, I’ll do a run,’ then nights chasing Ascension 10 — is a description of handheld play whether or not she frames it that way. Deck owners don’t boot a roguelike for a six-hour epic; they boot it because a run fits between other things, and because SteamOS suspend-resume lets them walk away mid-turn without losing the seed. Slay the Spire 2 being in early access cuts both ways on Deck: it’s less balanced than the original, but a 2D, turn-based deckbuilder is about the least hardware-demanding thing a modern Steam Deck can run, so early-access jank here is a design problem, not a performance one.

The same logic explains why her hours skew singleplayer even though co-op exists. Roguelikes made the case for portable PCs before the hardware could run much of anything else, and a deckbuilder remains the ideal flex: it’s the game you keep installed because there’s always one more run in it.

Detective Games Want a Notebook — Handhelds Already Ship You One

Burch’s running fight with detective games is whether clue-tracking should live inside the system or on paper. She resists the notebook every time, eventually caves for Blue Prince and Lorelei and the Laser Eyes, and still isn’t convinced which answer is right. On a Steam Deck that debate lands differently: there’s no second monitor and no alt-tab worth a thumbstick, so a physical notebook — or the Deck’s screenshot button, which dumps straight into your library — becomes the external memory the game refuses to build.

That’s the quiet argument for playing these games portably. A detective game is one you put down and pick up, and carrying a pad of paper alongside the handheld is part of the ritual rather than a workaround. The genres Burch gravitates toward — roguelikes, deduction puzzles, cosy sims — are exactly the ones that survive a commute, a lunch break, or a red-eye without being treated like an appointment.

Aloy’s Own Voice Actor Wants Fewer Stoic Badasses

The most quotable part of the interview is Burch’s plea against the stoic, cool, badass archetype — ironic given she’s spent years voicing Aloy, arguably the poster child for it. Her counter-example is Slay the Spire 2’s Regent, a prissy little king whose throne is held up by two shaking minions. You don’t get that kind of characterisation in most big-budget leads, because a stoic hero sells in every territory and offends no focus group.

Portable gaming is where the alternative survives. Character-forward oddballs — Parvati in The Outer Worlds, Chloe in Life is Strange, Burch’s own theatrical menace in Borderlands — travel well precisely because they’re the reason you keep a save loaded on a handheld. If you want more shtty little btches in your games, you’ll find them in the indie and handheld-adjacent space long before the next stoic blockbuster ships a lead worth remembering. Burch, with 270 hours of Slay the Spire 2 on her Deck, is already living that preference out — and it’s the best argument for keeping a run-based game permanently installed.