Three months, three review bombs. Slay the Spire 2 launched March 5, 2026 and immediately became one of Steam’s biggest games ever — 574,638 concurrent players at its peak, according to TheGamer. As of mid-May, the deckbuilding roguelike is still pulling over 100,000 concurrent and sitting at #10 on Steam’s Top Sellers chart.

Scroll past the headline numbers and the picture gets complicated. The aggregate rating sits at “Very Positive” — 94% across 58,116 reviews, per the game’s Steam page. The recent rating: “Mostly Negative.” Yahoo reports 79,824 negative reviews have accumulated since launch, nearly 14 times the total negative reviews the original Slay the Spire collected in nine years.

The gap between those two ratings is the real story, and it has three acts.

Patch, Revert, Repeat

Wave one hit in March. Mega Crit shipped a balance patch that gutted cards players considered essential — the Silent’s Prepared, Necrobinder’s Borrowed Time and Capture Spirit. The backlash was immediate and loud enough that Mega Crit rolled everything back within days, writing that “Prepared is so integral to the Silent’s core identity that I will be looking for a different approach to bring Sly in line in the future.” Standard Early Access turbulence, handled fast.

Wave two arrived in April alongside the first major content update. The Doormaker boss entered the rotation and players — particularly in China, where Slay the Spire 2 has a large audience — despised it. Mega Crit co-founder Casey Yano acknowledged the communication gap with Chinese players, telling press it was “kind of unfortunate that they feel that the only way to be heard is through Steam reviews.” The Doormaker was removed entirely. Some players with 100+ hours logged still flipped their reviews to negative over the difficulty spike and the removal of a custom game mode.

The Dumb One

Wave three has nothing to do with gameplay. Media critic Anita Sarkeesian — founder of Feminist Frequency, Gamergate target since 2014 — is listed as a consultant in the credits. Her name has been there since launch. Kotaku reports that some of the latest negative reviews come from accounts that purchased the game the same day, seemingly to leave a bad review before refunding.

Nobody has identified a single thing Sarkeesian changed in the game. The other two credited consultants, David Von Derau and Tony Moore, have drawn zero complaints. Steam has flagged the current wave as “off-topic review activity” and is filtering it from the aggregate score.

The Signal Under the Noise

Strip away the Sarkeesian-driven review bomb and you’re left with legitimate gripes buried under manufactured outrage. One Steam reviewer with 19.0 hours played called the game “totally RNG based” — a loaded accusation for a deckbuilder whose predecessor built its reputation on rewarding strategic play over lucky draws. Another with 160.9 hours changed their review to negative after a custom mode they relied on was removed, adding that “the doormaker is an insanely difficult boss now.”

Some of this is classic sequel friction: players who mastered the original bumping up against a new game that hasn’t been balanced yet. Some of it might be players who loved Slay the Spire discovering that what they actually enjoyed was mastery, not the roguelike loop itself. Mega Crit has demonstrated it can take feedback and act on it — the March revert was responsive and decisive.

But the signal-to-noise problem is real. When legitimate complaints about RNG feel, overtuned bosses, and removed features get sandwiched between hundreds of reviews triggered by a name in the credits, the developer’s job becomes filtering instead of building. Mega Crit needs clear feedback on what’s working and what isn’t. What it’s getting instead is a fire hose.

Slay the Spire 2 costs $24.99 on Steam. It’s still Early Access. The original game took years of iteration to become the genre-definer its fans revere. Mega Crit has earned the patience to get there — but patience works better when the feedback channel isn’t actively on fire.

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