Mega Crit’s first big post-launch balance patch for Slay the Spire 2 has barely had time to breathe on Steam’s opt-in beta branch, and it’s already detonated a community firestorm. In less than 24 hours, players piled on over 9,000 negative Steam reviews—many furious about a controversial card change that hasn’t even gone live on the main branch.
But this isn’t just another “gamers hate nerfs” moment. A huge share of the review surge appears to be coming from Simplified Chinese users, and the reality is that Steam community features are blocked in China, while Discord is also inaccessible there—meaning review bombing may be one of the only highly visible pressure valves available to a big chunk of the playerbase.
What happened: Mega Crit’s first “BIG” patch lands on the beta branch—and players revolt
The spark is Beta Patch v0.100.0, described by Mega Crit as the game’s “first BIG post-launch patch” and headlined by a “huge balance pass” aimed primarily at making infinite combos harder to assemble. The patch is currently opt-in via Steam’s beta settings, giving players a testing window before it rolls out broadly.
That’s the key detail a lot of the outrage is tripping over: this isn’t a forced live update for everyone. You have to deliberately switch to the beta branch to play it. And yet the reaction has been immediate and massive—Steam’s review activity spiking from the usual background noise to a full-on campaign.
The numbers being cited vary by snapshot in time, but the direction is unmistakable: thousands upon thousands of negative reviews landed in a single day, with one count exceeding 9,000 in under 24 hours and other tallies climbing even higher as the day went on. The game’s overall Steam rating has taken a visible hit in the short term, even as the broader review picture remains strong in some regions and languages.
And that’s where the story gets more complicated—and more interesting.
The nerf at the center of the storm: Prepared becomes Prepare, and Silent mains see red
If you want the single change that lit the match, it’s this: The Silent’s Prepared—a classic, beloved, and extremely flexible tool—has been fundamentally redesigned.
In its prior form, Prepared was a 0-cost skill that let you discard a card and draw a replacement, a simple effect that becomes absurdly powerful in a game built around deck cycling, discard synergies, and precision hand sculpting. It’s the kind of card that doesn’t just “help,” it defines how a whole archetype feels to pilot.
In the beta patch, Prepared is replaced by “Prepare.” The new version costs 1 energy, has you discard two cards, and then grants energy on your next turn (with the upgraded version granting more). That’s not a tweak. That’s a philosophical rewrite—turning a smooth, immediate hand-fixing tool into a delayed-resource card that asks you to throw away more of your current options.
Players are reacting to that redesign as a double hit: it weakens a key enabler for discard/cycle strategies while the patch simultaneously makes the overall game environment harsher through broader balance changes.
And it’s not just Silent players feeling targeted. The patch includes sweeping adjustments across characters—especially newer ones like The Regent and Necrobinder—with multiple changes framed around curbing “cheeky” infinites and smoothing out the power curve.
The problem is that for many players, “curbing infinites” reads as “removing the fun,” particularly in a single-player roguelike where broken runs are part of the fantasy. For others—especially multiplayer-focused players—infinites can be a genuine pacing problem, because long turns can force teammates to sit and watch a combo unfold.
That tension is real. But the community isn’t arguing in a calm design roundtable right now. It’s arguing with the bluntest instrument Steam provides.
Doormaker got teeth: the boss buff that’s scaring players as much as it’s exciting them
The other lightning rod is a buff to Doormaker, the Act 3 boss that, by many accounts, needed to be more than a speed bump for optimized decks.
In the beta patch, Doormaker now has a brutal new mechanic: it can eat (permanently remove) every 10th card you draw during the fight, and it can gain Strength when it does. That’s a dramatic escalation because it doesn’t just punish sloppy play—it can snipe a key piece of your engine and invalidate your plan mid-fight.
Mega Crit even teased the danger in the patch notes with a warning to “beware” Doormaker, and players have taken that as confirmation that the studio is deliberately pushing the game toward a more punishing, less escapable style of difficulty.
This is where the outrage starts to sound less like “I lost my favorite toy” and more like a broader fear: that Slay the Spire 2 is trending toward harder enemies + fewer player outs, especially for runs that aren’t already optimized into cycling loops.
One of the most upvoted negative reviews making the rounds argues that the real issue isn’t that players “prefer” infinites—it’s that the game’s pressures push them into those builds as the most reliable way to survive. That critique has become a rallying point: don’t just nerf the dominant solution, the argument goes, fix the environment that makes it dominant.
Phobia Mode is a genuinely meaningful addition—yet it’s being drowned out by the balance war
Lost in the noise is the patch’s most broadly positive feature: Phobia Mode.
Phobia Mode is a toggle in the settings designed to reduce or replace imagery that may be triggering for some players. When enabled, it turns off the animation for the infection affliction overlay and swaps in alternate visuals for several enemies and backgrounds—particularly creepy-crawly, bug-and-worm-adjacent elements.
Importantly, the patch notes emphasize that the mechanics and gameplay of those encounters remain the same. This is an accessibility and comfort option, not a difficulty slider.
It’s the kind of feature that signals a studio paying attention to a wider range of players—and it deserves credit. But in the current climate, it’s being treated like a footnote stapled to a nerf manifesto.
The patch isn’t just nerfs: quality-of-life changes and broader tuning are in the mix
Even if the community conversation is stuck on Prepared/Prepare and Doormaker, v0.100.0 is a big, messy, early access-style patch touching nearly everything:
- A huge balance pass across enemies, relics, and cards, with a stated goal of making infinites harder to achieve
- Class tweaks, including notable attention to The Regent and Necrobinder
- New art and visual effects, including effects tied to gaining energy
- UI/UX changes, including the ability to skip relics from treasure chests
- Changes affecting Daily and Custom runs and what they can unlock
- A long list of bug fixes, including stability issues and multiplayer sync/softlock fixes
- Multiplayer balance adjustments, including changes to several strong co-op cards
There’s also at least one economy-facing tweak called out: relic shop costs reduced (one report describes a reduction, while another specifies shop relic costs being cut by a set amount). Either way, the intent is clear—some parts of the patch are designed to make runs feel better and smoother, not just harsher.
But balance patches are emotional. They always are. And when a patch is explicitly designed to target the most explosive, most community-celebrated strategies, it’s basically guaranteed to trigger a culture war over what the game “should” be.
Why so many negative reviews, so fast? China’s Steam and Discord restrictions may be a major accelerant
Here’s the part too many people are going to miss if they only look at the raw review count: a striking portion of the recent negative review activity is coming from Simplified Chinese users.
That matters because Steam’s community features are blocked on the Chinese version of Steam, including Steam discussion forums. And Discord is unusable in China, which means even if Mega Crit is actively collecting feedback in an official Discord channel, a huge segment of players simply can’t access that pipeline without using a VPN.
So what’s left?
- An in-game feedback feature, which some players may worry will be slowed by language barriers and the realities of a small Western studio
- Steam reviews, which are highly visible, easily counted, and impossible for a developer to ignore
That doesn’t magically make review bombing “good,” and it doesn’t guarantee every review is thoughtful or in good faith. But it does explain why this backlash might be disproportionately loud on Steam compared to other games where players can funnel their anger into forum threads, Discord debates, or other community channels.
There’s also a structural quirk amplifying the optics: Slay the Spire 2 is still new enough that it doesn’t have a separate “recent reviews” highlight on its Steam page in the way older titles often do. That means a sudden wave of negatives can feel like it’s rewriting the entire public perception of the game in real time—especially when you filter by language and see dramatically different ratings.
In at least one language view, the game’s rating drops to “Mixed” with a much lower positive percentage, while the broader English-language picture remains far more favorable. That split is important: this isn’t one unified global community reacting the same way. It’s multiple communities with different access, different expectations, and different ways to be heard.
My take: Mega Crit is right to target infinites—but the “how” matters, and the beta context is being ignored
Let’s be blunt: infinite loops are part of the DNA of deckbuilders, and Slay the Spire has always flirted with the joy of breaking itself. But Slay the Spire 2 also has multiplayer, and that changes the stakes. A single player taking a five-minute turn isn’t just self-indulgent—it can be a co-op pacing problem.
So yes, the goal of making infinites “harder to achieve” is defensible. It’s arguably necessary if Mega Crit wants the sequel to have a healthier long-term meta, especially in co-op.
But the community’s core fear isn’t irrational: if you nerf the most reliable survival tools while simultaneously buffing enemies and bosses, you risk making the game feel like it’s squeezing players into fewer viable lines. That’s the nightmare scenario for a roguelike: not “hard,” but “narrow.”
And then there’s the elephant in the room: this is an opt-in beta patch. The entire point is to test, iterate, and adjust before it hits the main branch. Review bombing the base game over experimental tuning is like screaming at a chef because you tasted the sauce before it was finished.
At the same time, I can’t ignore the access issue. If a big chunk of your audience can’t use your preferred feedback channels, they’re going to use the channels they do have. Steam reviews are a megaphone, and right now, they’re being used as one.
The real question is what Mega Crit does next: whether it treats this as noise to be waited out, or as a signal that some changes—especially the Prepared-to-Prepare redesign—need a second pass in terms of feel, not just numbers.
What Remains Unknown
- When (or if) Beta Patch v0.100.0 will roll out to the main branch, and what changes will be revised before then
- Whether Mega Crit will revisit the Prepared/Prepare redesign specifically, or adjust surrounding systems to preserve discard/cycle archetypes
- How the studio plans to collect feedback from players in regions with restricted access to Steam community tools and Discord
- Whether Doormaker’s new mechanic will be tuned further based on beta data and player reports
- Any updated communication from Mega Crit addressing the review bombing wave directly (no official response beyond the patch messaging has been confirmed here)
