What happened
Slay the Spire 2 has been review-bombed for the third time in less than two months. The first two waves were driven by balance patches. This third wave is driven by something entirely different.
In early May 2026, players discovered that media critic Anita Sarkeesian is listed as a consultant in the game's credits. Sarkeesian is known for the "Tropes vs. Women in Video Games" series and became a central figure during the 2014 Gamergate controversy. Her presence in the credits triggered a rapid influx of negative reviews that pushed the game's recent Steam score from Mixed to Mostly Negative.
Multiple outlets reported the shift around May 8-10, 2026. GameRant noted that approximately 66 percent of recent reviews were negative. TheGamer reported a similar ratio across nearly 50,000 recent reviews. Chinese gaming media tracked over 5,000 negative reviews within three days of the discovery, with roughly 70 percent of new reviews in that window being negative.
This is not a repetition of the April patch backlash. The earlier review bomb was about card balance, ascension costs, and boss pacing. This one is about who the developer chose to credit. The complaints are different, the reviewers are different, and the overlap between the two groups is unclear. What is clear is that the combined weight of three review bombs in under two months has left Slay the Spire 2 with a storefront signal that looks nothing like its launch reputation.
For the live tracking view, see the Slay the Spire 2 game page or the Steam review analytics hub.
Why it matters
The important point is not whether a consultant credit justifies a negative review. The important point is that Steam's review system treats all negative reviews the same way regardless of their stated reason. A review bomb driven by balance frustration and a review bomb driven by credit discovery both push the same storefront metric in the same direction. The system does not distinguish motive. It only aggregates signal.
That creates a compounding problem for Slay the Spire 2. The April patch backlash already weakened the recent score to Mixed. The May credit discovery then pushed it to Mostly Negative. The two triggers are independent, but their effects are additive on the storefront. A prospective buyer who checks the Steam page today sees a Mostly Negative recent score for a game that was Overwhelmingly Positive at launch.
The speed also matters. ReviewBomb's earlier coverage tracked the first wave as a patch-backlash case with 58,161 reviews and a 51 percent positive ratio on April 20. The May reports describe a ratio closer to 34 percent positive across a similar review volume. That is not a small drift. It is a full category downgrade.
Mega Crit has not issued a public statement about the consultant credit at the time of writing. The studio did respond to the April balance complaints with patch notes, rollback commits, and direct community engagement. The absence of a similar response to the May wave may reflect a judgment that this issue is not addressable through code changes, or it may simply reflect a decision to wait for the storm to pass.
What happens next
The most likely short-term outcome is that Valve's review filter will eventually separate the credit-driven reviews from the gameplay-driven ones. Valve has filtered ideologically motivated review bombs before, including cases tied to developer identity, political statements, and off-platform controversies. If a significant share of the May reviews cite the consultant credit rather than gameplay experience, filtering is probable.
That would help the storefront score recover, but it would not erase the underlying pattern. Three review bombs in under two months is a warning signal in itself, regardless of how each one is classified. It indicates that Slay the Spire 2 has become a persistent target for coordinated negative attention, and that the game's public reputation is now vulnerable to triggers that have nothing to do with its design quality.
For Mega Crit, the practical question is whether the next patch can rebuild enough positive momentum to offset the accumulated negative weight. The studio has already shown it can iterate quickly. The question is whether players still trust the iteration process after seeing the review score swing this far, this fast, for this many different reasons.
For players, the practical takeaway is that the current storefront score is a compressed summary of multiple unrelated complaints. A Mostly Negative recent score does not mean the game is broken. It means the community around the game is fractured, and that the review system is currently reflecting that fracture more loudly than the game's actual quality.
ReviewBomb verdict
Slay the Spire 2 is now the clearest example on Steam of how unrelated review-bomb triggers can compound into a single storefront warning signal. The April wave was about balance. The May wave is about credits. Steam's review system sees them as the same color on the same graph.
The core question is no longer whether Mega Crit can fix a specific patch. It is whether the game's public reputation can survive being a persistent review-bomb target before it even leaves Early Access. The design may be sound, but the signal is noisy.
For the broader context, see how ReviewBomb detects review surges and what makes a Steam review trend meaningful.
Related incident data: compare this coverage with the tracked Slay the Spire 2 incident, where ReviewBomb keeps the review velocity and severity context attached to the live dataset.