After a Mixed early access launch, acclaimed Metroidvania director behind the Ori games is striving to turn his new action-RPG's Steam rating from a "58 into a 90"

After a mixed debut, No Rest for the Wicked’s director wants to turn the new action-RPG’s Steam approval rating from a 58 to a 90.

Ori developer Moon Studios tried something incredibly different to the Metroidvania platformer last week with the launch of No Rest for the Wicked into Steam Early Access. The hack-and-slash RPG was sadly met with mixed reviews upon launch, with reviewers noting aspects such as technical issues like performance problems, and a lack of accessibility features like key rebinding. 

No Rest for the Wicked’s director, Thomas Mahler, sees this as a challenge to be overcome, rather than an insurmountable feat. In the recent tweet below, Mahler says the “next few weeks and months” for Moon Studios will be about turning the action-RPG’s Steam approval rating from a “58 into a 90,” the former of which being the percentage of positive reviews the game had at launch.

Mahler adds in a follow-up tweet that he’s “extremely confident in what we built,” when responding to another Twitter user. The studio CFO adds that it’ll be “fun to see what’ll do the trick,” seemingly pointing to a wide variety of features in development for No Rest for the Wicked. 

What’s more, another developer on Twitter claims that the majority of negative Steam reviews for No Rest for the Wicked were made when the user had only played the action-RPG for less than an hour. “Positivity goes up,” software engineer Forrest Smith wrote on Twitter, albeit it less than he expected. 

Thankfully for Moon Studios, things are already looking up. Right now on Steam, although No Rest for the Wicked’s aggregate user review is set at ‘Mixed,’ 66% of reviews recommend the game for others, which is nearly a double-digit increase compared to the 58% the game originally launched with. 

The improvement could have something to do with the two hotfixes that launched over the past weekend. Hotfix one arrived on April 20, with eight balance changes, loot changes, and stability improvements, while hotfix two on April 21 focused significantly on performance improvements, while also re-tuning item durability on tools. The bolstered Steam review score might be attributable to these two updates.

No Rest for the Wicked dev explains that its ARPG is - and isn't - like Dark Souls by giving players the "crazy" moves usually reserved for Soulslike bosses.