As their acclaimed JRPG gets review-bombed, indie publisher calls on Metacritic to do more

gamesradar.com:

The publisher of an acclaimed indie JRPG has called on review aggregate site MetaCritic to take action after the game was review-bombed for no discernible reason.

In a recent tweet, Michael Hoss, head of product at publisher Deck13, highlighted a spate of negative user reviews attached to Chained Echoes. The JRPG launched last year to a Metacritic (opens in new tab) score of 90 as well as a 'Must Play' badge, and it currently boasts 'very positive' reviews on Steam. In recent days, however, the Switch, PC, and PS4 Metacritic pages have received dozens of negative user ratings each, dragging the user scores down to around five or six out of ten.

Now it happened to us. @ChainedEchoes has been review bombed on Metacritic. Just plain ratings, no reviews. No reasons. We don't know why, it just happened. Didn't @metacritic want to stop this nonsense? Guess only for AAA games. #indiedev #metacritic #gamedev pic.twitter.com/Qit6pusT5FMay 9, 2023

Those ratings don't come with any written reviews, and as such Hoss says that neither he nor the development team have any idea where the tide of ill-feeling has come from. 

One assumption is that the review-bomb is tied to localization. Recently, the Chained Echoes team took to Reddit for an AMA, and the publisher notes that, "quite often you get 'hey, translate into Spanish," or 'when Chinese', or 'when Brazil port'." Deck13 has tried to explain that due to the length of the game, cost of translation, and relatively small install bases in some regions, localization is often not possible. While some players have made their desire for more language options clear, however, it's not certain that this is the problem at the heart of the review-bomb.

Hoss called out Metacritic in his