No Rest for the Wicked creative director puts most of the ARPG's poor reviews down to a localization bug that stopped a lot of Chinese and Japanese text from showing

Highly anticipated action RPG No Rest for the Wicked has launched into early access with a 'Mixed' verdict on Steam, but according to creative director Thomas Mahler, this is largely thanks to a localization bug that broke a lot of Chinese and Japanese text.

Moon Studios' No Rest for the Wicked was met with some seriously high praise from former Blizzard boss Mike Ybarra when it released, with him going as far to say that its "bold direction" is "exactly where the ARPG genre needs to go to stay relevant." With that in mind, you'd expect a few more positive reviews, but Mahler claims that "the majority of our mixed reviews on Steam come from our Chinese fans" who've been struggling with a major bug. 

"Localization came in extremely hot and we had an initial bug that didn't show a lot of text if you played in Chinese, Japanese, etc. We got a ton of negative reviews for that (justifiably so)," Mahler explains. "This bug has been fixed since and more localization fixes are coming!"

In a separate message written in Chinese (and machine translated by Google and DeepL), Mahler reiterates that the localization bug has been ironed out, but asks Chinese-speaking players to "let us know what else we're missing." He adds: "We're working hard to make sure you all have a great gaming experience, but since we don't speak Chinese, we need you to tell us directly what's bothering you!"

As for other issues and complaints, Mahler points to the fact that the game is still in early access, although "we understand that people paid good money to play Wicked, so they expect a good experience on their machines from the get-go." However, some optimization fixes have already been implemented, and more improvements and content updates are coming, too, including quality-of-life features that the devs "just weren't able to deliver in time."

Despite some of the more critical responses to the game, Mahler says Moon Studios feels "extremely positive about the initial reception" to the ARPG. He adds that the team is "making the game I always dreamed of playing and I think by now it's pretty clear that I wasn't alone in wanting to play something like No Rest for the Wicked for a long time!"

No Rest for the Wicked's production and technical director previously stated that the game's level design is "much more Metroidvania" than most ARPGs.