Slay the Spire 2's Consultant Controversy — Reviews Slide Again in May

May brought the sequel's second rating storm, and this one wasn't about balance. Criticism flared over consultant credits in the game's staff list — most prominently the inclusion of media critic Anita Sarkeesian, a figure long controversial in gaming spaces — and the resulting review wave pushed Slay the Spire 2's Simplified Chinese Steam rating down to "Mostly Negative."

The notable shift was geographic. Previous review waves had been predominantly Chinese-community affairs — the March infinite-nerf backlash — with English-language regions standing apart. This round crossed over: players who had earlier dismissed the Chinese reviews as oversensitivity now posted critical reviews of their own over the credits issue, and the English-region rating sagged toward the same territory.

The compounding effect was cumulative fatigue. The game had absorbed the March balance storm, recovered through the 0.101 rollback, and now faced a culture-war grievance that no patch could mechanically fix — consultant credits aren't a tunable value, and Mega Crit's playbook of data-plus-dialogue had no lever for it.

The episode sits in the longer arc that Early Access games increasingly navigate: a record-breaking launch builds a playerbase of millions, and a community that large will litigate everything — balance, credits, values — in public, on the rating page. The subsequent May review wave kept the pressure on before the curve finally bent back.

Keep reading:

• The May Review-Bomb Wave
• Official Response to Player Feedback