Since the release of the modding tools, there have been a lot of different kind of mods created for Slay the Spire. Character mods that add new ways to play, Act mods that add new enemies to fight, relic mods, re balance mods, and so much more. Lobotomy is a unique mod where it starts off really simple, just adding some new wacky cards and a few new enemies to fight, but turns into something absolutely insane as you progress through and learn about the mechanics.
This mod is based on a Japanese cult favourite monster management game, Lobotomy Corporation. It uses a lot of Lobotomy Corporation’s ideas and assets to create a completely unique psychological horror deckbuilding roguelite in slay the spire.
My recommendation is to play the Lobotomy Mod by itself or just with a few quality of life mods. It’s not something that you can experience in just one run, but you’ll experience it over the course of multiple runs as multiple characters with your progression staying between them.
To start off in this mod, you’ll have to pick the new final Neow Option, “Obtain Bucket”, which will give you a new relic, The Bucket.
While you have this bucket relic, all combats will reward you with a secondary card choice for these new abnormality cards.
These abnormality cards are all hidden at first, with only a short and creepy excerpt that gives a hint to what the card actually does.
You have to take one of these hidden abnormality cards to start earning PE points, shown by the number below your bucket relic, as rewards for combats.
You can either blindly use this hidden card, or just keep it in your deck for a while, you’ll earn these PE points at the end of every combat depending on how many abnormalities are in your deck.
When you have a decent amount of PE points, right click on your abnormality card and press this keylock button to identify what the card actually is. The price of identifying is based on the rarity of the card, and most cards have multiple pages to identify to fully understand what it does. All affects on abnormality cards are always active whether you’ve identified them or not.
These abnormality cards have a lot of crazy unique effects, and might drive you insane as you try to figure them out. A common theme is the first page or 2 being really good effects, while the final few pages unveil a hidden downside that can really mess you up.
Let’s use the first card I identified this playthrough for example, Little Red Riding Hooded Mercenary. The first page says “Draw an extra card at the start of each combat, and while below half HP you deal 40% more damage.”, this sounds like an amazing card, right? As we use our hard earned PE points throught the run to research this abnormality further, we learn on the next page that every time we exhaust 3 cards, we gain this new bleeding debuff that causes us to lose 2 hp at the end of the turn. Pretty bad downside, but there’s still one more page to discover. The final page is an effect that will only activate if you have another specific not yet discovered abnormality, and will exhaust this card, making all of it’s effects no longer active that battle.
Let me give a few more examples of this discovery phase for abnormality cards, since we just talked about an uncommon, lets talk about a common, Spider Bud.
The first page shows us that when this card is drawn, we’ll draw 1 more card. The second page shows us that we can play Spider bud to exhaust the top card in our deck, could be good for an exhaust synergy. The final page makes this even better, showing us that the card draw effect of the first page can get stronger up to 5 cards depending on the amount of cards exhausted by the second page’s effect.
There are a lot of really simple common abnormalities like this, some with drastic downsides, another quick example is schorched girl, a 2 energy attack that can deal 20 or more damage depending on your handsize, but is has ethereal, and as we learn from the next page, if this card is exhausted through ethereal or any other means, you will take 30 damage.
Blue Star is a rare Abnormality that gives you an extra energy per turn just for being in your deck. On it’s second page you learn that you can also play this card to deal 6 damage times your current energy to random enemies. Sounds amazing so far, but the downsides start coming on the third page where you learn that whenever you end your turn with 0 energy, 2 random cards will be exhausted, and on the final page you learn that if you have no cards in your hand at the end of your turn, you’ll deal 12 damage to yourself. A lot of the rare Abnormalities offer super powerful passive effects like this but can completely brick your deck if not careful.
Ordeals are a new combat event that can randomly replace any hallway fight with new and unique monsters from the Lobotomy Corporation game.
Dusk
Act 1 Ordeal spawns 3 Fruit of understanding’s that don’t attack, but have 4 thorns each.
Act 2 Ordeal spawns 4 sweepers with 60 hp and heavy hits. They will full heal whenever one of their friends die.
Act 1Ordeal spawns these three clowns that will hit exhaust your cards and explode on death.
Act 2 Food Chain, similar to the Transient, will lose strength for every point of damage taken for the turn. He’ll attack for massive numbers and summon little minions.
Act 3 Where to Reach, that won’t attack but will constantly summon minions, starting with weak doubts, then some process’s of understanding. It’ll also heal itself in between summons.
These ordeals are a quite a bit harder than the normal hallway fights you’d be encountering, but they reward you with a choice of 3 new powerful Lobotomy Relics! These relics are of course hidden at first, but once you have it, it’ll be unhidden for all future runs. While most of these relics are really powerful, most of them also have a huge downside that requires you to be careful, similar to the abnormality cards.
A few examples of these relics are the
Luminous Bracelet that raises your max hp by 15 and gives you 1 regen every time you lose HP, but if you don’t lose HP for 6 turns you’ll lose 10 maximum HP,
Prophecy of the Skin that raises your max HP by 2 per combat, but also cause you to lose 4 hp at the start of each combat.
Backwards clock that lets you activate it to record a point in time, and re-activate any time later to return to that original point.
The act 3 ordeals are really challenging and will require a really good deck with solid AOE and scaling damage. Once you defeat one of these act 3 ordeals, you’ll be given an “At midnight” relic, that when toggled on, will replace the act 3 boss to a “midnight ordeal” boss, one of the final challenges. These fights are insanely tough, you’re going to have to bring the best decks utilizing some of these abnormalities and new relics to defeat them.
Defeating the Midnight Ordeal will win the run and unlock the next ascension level, just like normal.
When you have a certain amount of abnormalities identified, you’ll see a new option whenever you take the bucket to look back. This will introduce you to Lobotomy Corporation’s Angela, who will offer you a drink at the beginning of the run if you’ve been losing lately, that can give you more PE that you can use to identify, 160 gold, or a deployment of the Rabbit Team.
The rabbit team is a relic that you can use once per run to spend your PE points and deploy rabbits to fight by your side. These rabbits deal a ton of damage and are really helpful for some of the ridiculous fights in this mod.
As you unlock 30% of all abnormalities, you’ll unlock a new option at Angela to Challenge, which will turn all Ordeals this run White.
These White Ordeals will now randomly replace hallway fights with these Fixers, super powerful enemies with 200 or more HP.
These fixers come in different colours, all of them have really heavy hitting attacks, and another skill, for example, the white fixer will go immune and reflect all damage for a turn. If you manage to get to act 3 against these guys, the final boss will now be replaced with a new midnight ordeal, the Claw, an insanely powerful boss with 1000 HP and a ridiculous amount of damage.
If you manage to beat this boss, your next run you’ll be greeted by a new character, Myo, who will explain more about the Rabbit protocol relic we talked a bit about earlier, and then give you one charge for the run. From now on, every time you take the bucket, you’ll also be given a charge of the rabbit protocol.
When you unlock 60% of the abnormalities, you’ll be able to give back the bucket to angela, which unlocks her as a playable character!
Angela is a really cool character, her starter deck is just 8 of these bullets that deal 8 damage.
You’re able to add some cards to your starter deck with the opportunity to expand 3 of 9 departments. Each of these departments give you a different card, and you’re able to expand them further in the run to get even more effects. For example, the Control Team Order let’s you choose 2 cards to cost 1 less energy this turn, the Central Team Order will discard all bullets to gain 6 block each, and the Training Team Order lets you upgrade 3 cards in your hand.
A really annoying thing about Angela is that she’s not able to see health bars, intents, or even status’s until she upgrades the Information Department multiple times.
Every combat victory will reward you with 2 LOB Points that can be spent on various things like upgrading each department’s card to make them slightly stronger. You can also spend 2 points to add an additional bullet to your deck, and 5 points to expand a department which gets their next unlock, up to 3 times. You can also expand departments at rest sites. These Department unlocks give you various passives or cards. Expanding the Record team twice will make all gold rewards 50% higher, upgrading the Information team 3 times will give you 4 max HP whenever you add an abnormality to your deck. Expanding the Control Team twice gives you a TT2 Protocol card that plays your entire hand left to right for 3 energy, and fully expanding the Records team gives you an extra potion slot.
Upgrading these departments will unlock several types of bullets that you can switch between with the menu to the left. The Disciplinary team gives you a Qlipoth Intervention Field that applies weak and vulnerable to enemies, and the Central Command Team unlocks the Physical Intervention Shield that turns bullets into blocking cards, and Trauma Shields that give you one artifact.
The various Bullets, Cards, and other effects from these departments paired with the Abnormalities make this class really interesting to play.
She only gets 2 choices of card rewards from her own pool, and a lot of these cards are really basic.
There are simple attacks like Grinder mk4 that deals 2 damage 3 times, and Wrist Cutter that makes the enemy take extra damage whenever they are attacked. There are simple skills like Todays Expression that removes all debuffs to give you block per debuff, and Red eyes that gains strength if the enemy plans on attacking.
Angela has a lot of Exhaust Synergies that pair really well with many abnormalities, with powers like Regret that gives you metalicize every time you exhaust, and Cherry Blossom that deals damage every time you exhaust.
If you chose to challenge at the beginning of the run, all ordeals will be white like before, but now that you’re playing as Angela, a new secret act 4 type ending will be available. You’ll fight a gauntlet of monsters based on the different departments that have insane health pools and do crazy things like remove all of your buffs, hide every cards, end your turns early, and more. If you manage to defeat this Gauntlet you’ll be able to fight a final epic secret boss for the true victory. This is where the mod starts getting really crazy, I would hate to spoil this part and would like to leave some mystery for you guys.
Speaking of this mod being really crazy, let’s look at the seperate LobotomyExtra mod. This mod is by the same creator, it’s like an expansion to the original mod, adding some crazy new mechanics to existing cards, and a new event.
The biggest thing this mod let’s you do is activate many abnormalities to summon them onto the battlefield. There’s 12 in total you can activate, and each has drastically different effects, some will help you, some will fight against you, and some won’t do either. It’s not exactly obvious what many of these summoned abnormalities do, usually it involves waiting a few combats, you’ll have to experiment and discover a lot of it as you progress through the run.
Let’s take a look at Red Riding Hood mercenary again, this is one of the abnormalities that can be activated to summon her behind your character where she’ll wait for a few turns. Then she’ll mark a target enemy and help you in combat until there are no enemies left, then she’ll target you and you’ll have to fight her. If you defeat her, you’ll get a new relic, Request, that you can activate to pay PE based on the enemy type, to summon the Mercenary to target them.
The Knight of Despair Abnormality normally gives you a passive where you gain 50% more block, but if you use the bucket to activate it, that card will be removed from your deck and the knight herself will join you in battle, giving you a new buff that makes you take 50% less damage until you take a certain amount. Once you take that amount, you lose the buff and the knight awakens, first targeting enemies with big attacks, and then you once no enemies are left. Defeating her will give you a new relic, the sword sharpened by tears, that makes you deal 40% extra damage if you have any debuffs.
The other main thing the LobotomyExtra mod adds is a new event where you can search 6 different rooms to interact with many of the abnormalities first-hand. To access this event, you must first take the Invitation Letter that usually comes as a reward for the first combat, and gives a chance to summon this event whenever you climb a floor. There are 6 rooms available, shown by the eye button on the top right. You’re able to search, which will show you what’s in each room, but will consume time. Time is an unlimited resource here, but many of the abnormalities effects will change depending on how much time you’ve used. When you enter the room, you can investigate, which will use up more time to see the danger level of the abnormality, or interact with it, which will give you it’s effect. Sometimes the effect is nothing, sometimes it’s a combat, sometimes it’ll let you upgrade cards, sometimes it will kill you. Once again, experimentation and discovery is a big part of this event.
Interacting with La Luna will let you upgrade some cards in return for taking a bunch of damage, and then give you the “Moonlight” Relic that switches the music every 3rd combat, and while that music is going on, La Luna will enter combat to help you in combat.
Interacting with the Broken Clock will send you all the way back to act 1 floor 1 with your same cards and relics.
And there’s a lot more I’ll let you discover.
I can see why the creator left this content as a separate mod, with all of these summonables, relics and crazy effects, your screen can get really bloated and hard to understand, but at the same time, it’s super fun discovering all of this stuff.
That’s it for lobotomy. I really suggest trying this mod out, it goes far above and beyond what you’d expect from an average slay the spire mod. It’s also extremely tough, so if you’re looking for a new challenge, here you go.
Thank you for watching this video, let me know if you have any suggestions for cool Mods I should look at, and have a great day!
